In The Silence I Hear You
by seaglasssoul
Summary: It's been so long since Soul could hear his own music. Even longer since he cared, after what music did to Wes and his family. But when his childhood friend Maka returns like a tempest to Death City and demands he accompany her in an upcoming competition, Soul must decide whether the pain of reclaiming his sound is worth the rush of playing with her again. A Your Lie in April AU.
1. The wound that nothing quells

**A/N:** IT'S FINALLY HERE! This is my contribution to Resbang 2016, and I am so thrilled to finally get this AU off my chest. Huge, HUGE thanks to my #Jortsquad beta server (Silly-twin-stars, zxanthe, Justifiably, makapedia, professor-maka, fabulousanima, marshofsleep, and adulterclavis), the people in which helped me grow as a writer and a person in ways I don't think they even know.

MEGA huge shout-out to my artists on this piece! I was lucky enough to have two, and the art for both can be found on the Resbang masterpost found by searching 'resbang masterpost 2016' on google. (Silly FFN, not letting us link) One of Jo's two art pieces is the cover for this fic! Please go flail all over their amazingness, and listen to Amber's voice acting from a scene in chapter six! With that, enjoy!

 **Warnings:** Depression, some suicidal ideation, some gore, major character death

* * *

Darkness coats the inside of his eyes, slithers down his throat, runs tar-like through his veins. He can hear it catching up to him, long, crackling, _inexorable_ footsteps beating a measured counterpoint to his frantic heart. Small hands materialize from the shadows to grope at his face and shove fingers down his throat, choking him with the taste of ash and dust.

Sprint. Jump. Duck. The world is reduced to spurts of action as his thoughts scatter like birds from a field, even as the ear-wrenching sound of squealing wires gets louder behind him. Terror propels him through rotting skeletons and over piles of dead crows, every instinct screaming that if he doesn't move faster, he'll meet a fate far worse than death.

He's always too late.

Bursting from a thicket with bleeding clefs for leaves, Soul runs to the edge of a sheer cliff, small rocks skittering into the inky abyss below. The world goes quiet, the kind of sharp silence after a gunshot, and then he's being strangled by hands with piano keys for fingers, black sludge leaking through the spaces between them.

"Why?" the voice whispers hoarsely, as it always does. "Why me, but not you?"

Scrabbling in vain against the ivory hands that hold him suspended, Soul cries, "I don't know! I don't know, I don't know, _I don't know!"_ Despair shoves the terror out of his system and he goes limp in the creature's grip, will to fight back trickling away at the sudden realization of who it is that hunts him so methodically.

"You abandoned us," it rasps, carrying Soul to the edge of the cliff.

The world yawns below him as he's dangled over the cliff face, panic coursing through him while he squirms and twists so he can make one last plea. "I didn't mean to! Wes _, please!_ "

Maggots skitter through the exposed bones of Wes's cheeks, empty sockets leering where blue eyes once regarded him so gently. Jutting between the tendons in his neck is a violin bow, the one pictured in the papers on the night he won the Death City Symphony Competition, and Soul has to swallow another sob because that was the photo they used in his obituary, too.

Flies buzz around his face as Wes says, "Sorry isn't good enough," and drops him.

All Soul can hear is the low growling roar of a huge waterfall, and suddenly he's plunged underwater, choking as liquid pours into his lungs. Except it isn't water, not really, and it's only with his last bit of consciousness that he realizes he's swimming in blood as black as the dark side of the moon.

A loud buzz jolts him awake, overwhelming horror still with him while he thrashes under the covers and nearly chokes himself with his sheet. Heart pounding, he sees his phone screen brighten briefly before going black. It takes a bit of untwisting to get himself into a position to grab it before he can tiredly swipe into his messages. Sure enough, there is a very loud text from Blake.

[[YO. DON'T IGNORE ME AGAIN. MEET AT FOUNTAIN PARK IN 30. LIZ HAS A SURPRISE FOR US]]

Frowning, Soul rolls back over, fatigue setting in again now that the adrenaline is wearing off. And here he thought he was doing so well, going a whole two days without a nightmare. Looking at the text again, Soul figures he has about ten minutes before he has to leave the house to make it there on time, which means he has eight minutes to stare at his ceiling and wonder again why he's still here.

His room is dark - as dark as he can get it in the Nevada sunshine - and covered in shrapnel from the last five and a half years. Bits of staff paper are scattered about the floor beneath heaps of clothing, small remnants from a time when he actually enjoyed music. Buried under old takeout containers and more crumpled paper, his desk stands tiredly with odd socks dotting the space where his computer chair should go. The chair itself broke a while back, back when his room was still clean, and Soul thumbs the scars on his wrist from when he flung it out the window.

But that was a long time ago.

Sighing, he rolls onto his side and sits up, rubbing the perpetual tension knot at the base of his neck. It doesn't take long to dig through what he figures is the clean pile of laundry (it doesn't reek, anyway), and soon he's wandering down long, echoing hallways to the garage where his motorcycle is parked.

Summer has come as it always does to Death City, with plenty of desert wildflowers and light, dusty breezes. Small succulents peek out of the cracks in the pavement as Soul speeds along on back roads, not paying nearly enough attention to the speed limit nor his proximity to other vehicles. Some days his gaze lingers just beyond the guardrail, where land surrenders to air, and he lets his body ever so slightly drift. But then the sun will stab at his eyes or a car will honk its horn and he'll wistfully turn back into his lane. Another day, then.

The specter of a new school year haunts him - July has bled into August, and he's only now mustering the energy to see his friends. Soon he'll be surrounded by the noise and the movement and the pointless posturing of his peers, and for what? Knowledge? Responsibility? Societal expectations of success? He's long since stopped caring about all that.

A red light stops him at an intersection and he glances down at the pavement so the sun doesn't completely blind him, balancing his weight on one leg while his bike idles. Maybe it's the pattern in the thin oil trail marking the ground, or maybe it's the way the liquid catches the light and shimmers red-black in the Nevada sun, but he's flung back to a different patch of road echoing with sirens and uniformed men.

Soul had been told he needed to "identify" his family, whatever that meant, but the officer who'd brought him there remained silent, glancing at Soul with something like sympathy every now and then as they'd woven their way through people and vehicles.

The moment Soul saw the overturned 18 wheeler, he knew.

Things became hazy after that, his memory shrouded for self-defense, but he remembers how the officer smelled like spearmint and cigarettes and the way the moon looked like a scythe blade, sharp and unforgiving as it illuminated what was left of his family.

He'd shoved his way through the uniforms guarding the scene so he could throw himself on the ground next to his parents and Wes, fisting his hands in their tattered shirts, yelling for them to wake up. Their blood looked like finger paint as he saw it drip from his hands after officers dragged him from the scene, cooling against the skin of his palms while he watched it dry and flake away.

They'd still been _warm_.

Inhale, hold, exhale. Soul grips the handlebars tighter until he can barely feel his fingernails digging into the worn leather, until the sun on the back of his neck beats a searing reprise across his pale skin. The light turns green and he's gone, accelerating as fast as he can to get away from echoing sirens and that panicked, helpless feeling he's never quite been able to shake.

It's not long before he's woven his way through the densest part of town and begun circling the block to look for a spot to park. After a few minutes he sees one by the entrance to the park and rushes for it, belatedly remembering to stow his helmet before he leaves. The small voice in the back of his mind, with a razor-edge Cheshire Cat smile and a cadence like a skipping record, whispers _why bother with the helmet at all?_

He sets the voice aside.

The park is a sprawling tangle of walking paths interspersed with drought-resistant greenery and a few carefully managed water features. He hardly walks five steps along the main path before he hears the resonant timbre of a violin, light and playful like sun dancing on water. The sound soothes him somehow, intrigues him, and he finds himself turning to follow it deeper into the park. As he listens, the bright tones painting a forest of blues and greens and yellows in his mind, he's reminded of Wes. Wes and his perfect pitch, his inability to do anything other than coax the most beautiful noises from any instrument that graced his hands.

But then the tone changes, turns from crisp lines to raw brush strokes, jagged around the edges, and it stirs something in his soul he thought had died years ago. With each rising crescendo and unpredictable twist of melody, he begins to feel like he knows this person, like he's caught a glimpse into their mind from the way they stutter their bow and use vibrato where none is traditional. There is something challenging and comforting about it, and he can't quite put his finger on the reason why.

That is, until he sees her.

Sunlight shines off her ash blonde hair, weaving bright highlights into long, wispy strands that hang halfway down her back. She's facing away from him at the moment, but he'd recognize that pleated skirt and those fearsome combat boots anywhere after years spent walking two steps behind her. She has one foot up on the fountain, resting a violin in the crook of her neck while she weaves her bow through the air like a magic wand. It might just be magic, Soul thinks, because he's never heard someone play the violin quite so dangerously, quite so _fiercely_ , before. He wants to sit and listen, to hear more from this person whose music shimmers behind his eyelids like fireworks, but he doesn't get the chance.

She turns around then, wind blowing her hair back, tears quietly streaming down her face as evergreen eyes meet his.

One final, drawn out note hovers in the air around them, settling around his shoulders like a lead mantle. Anger and a particularly personal kind of embarrassment roil in his gut at the sight of her here, in the flesh, after so many years spent wondering how much of her abrupt departure was his fault.

But he's still staring, and time is still moving, so he clears his throat and somehow says, "Hey, Maka. It's been a while."

Some emotion he can't quite place flickers behind her eyes as she scrubs at them, hopping down from the fountain on unsteady legs before walking over to him. Why she'd be crying here is beyond him, and he ruthlessly squashes the immediate urge to ask her - he's done caring. The last time he'd seen her was when she'd grabbed Wes and had a lengthy discussion in hushed tones while he sat at the piano and tried to ignore the fact that he was, once again, left out of their private little world.

It was, after all, always Wes she was chasing after.

"Soul?" she asks when she's close enough to speak, close enough to touch. Her voice is as strong and warm as he remembers, and he doesn't miss the concern that ripples across her features when she gets a good look at him. "Oh my goodness, Soul, I almost didn't recognize you! Blake and Liz told me you'd gotten lanky, but I didn't think you'd look quite so...skeletal." She reaches over and suddenly calloused fingers are skating over the bags under his eyes, hovering over the gaps in his sunken cheeks, tugging lightly at his perpetual scowl.

Keep it cool. Lock it down _._ He's used to these kinds of observations, used to being regarded as pitiful and unable to care for himself while others come up with the _best_ way for him to _get better_. Sure, he doesn't really have an appetite most of the time, and okay, he doesn't do much about it, but what does that matter to her? They used to hang out, emphasis on _used to_ , and without Wes to be the glue between them, Soul doesn't understand why she even wants to talk to him.

He shrugs out of her reach and shoves his hands in his pockets. "Whatever."

Her smile falters, though there's a bit of that old fire behind her eyes that he doesn't miss. It's the same whipcrack hardness he'd seen every time she took the stage and beguiled the audience with expertly executed layers of sound as she added her mark to the melody with a jumping bow and nimble fingers. She'd always pause for one, two, three beats at the end of particularly challenging songs, cocking her head to the side and staring towards the ceiling with a clenched jaw and combustion in her eyes before exhaling and stalking behind the curtain. Soul used to wonder what she'd been looking for, but now he doesn't care. It probably died with Wes.

"Well, Blake and Liz should be here soon to bring us to lunch, so I'd like to maybe catch up a bit before they get here."

He blinks. "Blake and Liz?" His thoughts flash to the text he received that morning and he gapes a little. " _You're_ the surprise Liz had?"

"Aw man, way to ruin my fun!" Turning around, Soul sees Liz striding towards them, dressed in torn jeans and her trademark cowboy boots. "I wanted to be the one to reunite the Wittle Symphony."

"Look at my favorite music dweebs, all in one place! It almost brings a tear to my eye." Blake is right beside her, sporting a tank top with the most obnoxiously brain-melting neon patterns Soul has ever seen and far too many criss-crossing chains across his pants.

Soul heaves a long-suffering sigh and considers just turning around right there. Blake is high maintenance in terms of the amount of mental energy needed to deal with him, and Soul isn't sure he has it in him anymore.

Liz seems to notice this and pulls Blake into a headlock. "Come on, there'll be time to make fun of them later. I'm _starving_ and we have a lot to catch up on."

Blake slips out of her halfhearted grip and inserts himself between Maka and Soul, flinging an arm around each of their shoulders. "Now that the gang's all here, we gotta battle plan for our senior year! It's gonna be _epic_."

Soul tries not to roll his eyes at the forced cheer in Blake's voice. After so many ignored phone calls and locked doors, Blake seems unsure of how to handle his former best friend besides pestering him with loud text messages whenever he wants to play basketball.

"Hey." Soul starts when he realizes Maka is talking to him and manages a small grunt of acknowledgement before she continues. "Have you been keeping up with the piano?

He clenches his jaw to keep from biting his tongue. "Not really."

She frowns at his clipped tone, but doesn't say anything else because they arrive at the restaurant. The Black Room used to be their usual hangout, and Soul notes that the dark-wooded pub seems as well-maintained and busy as he remembers.

Maka ducks out from under Blake's other arm. "Are you happy?" she asks once Blake leaves to speak to the host about a table.

Soul snorts. There's no way he's going to dignify _that_ with a response. She'd always loved to read the paper - she knows what happened.

Her eyes are so sad. "Happy not playing, I mean," she amends quietly.

He raises an eyebrow. Really, _this_ is what she talks about when she finally returns to Death City? Soul could almost laugh at how utterly absurd it is for her to feign interest in his playing when she didn't seem to care when he became the youngest living Evans.

"What does it matter?" he mutters, turning away from her. "'S not like you cared before."

She opens her mouth to respond when Blake whisper-yells that their table is ready and she looks at the ground instead, gesturing for him to go first. Soul acquiesces with an eyeroll - she can't even bear to look at him - and slumps into the booth next to Liz. Hopefully this will all be over soon.

An awkward silence settles over the table until Liz, glancing at Blake, launches into a story about how difficult varsity softball training camp was and Blake boisterously interjects with unnecessary euphemisms and gratuitous winking. Eventually, Maka has to intervene to stop the argument before either of them get riled up enough to get physical, and by that point the waiter has come to take their orders. Soul finds himself guessing what Maka will have - turkey burger with fries and a strawberry milkshake - right before she orders exactly that, and he clenches his jaw. Some memories die hard.

"Anyway, remember when you guys used to come in here to play on that piano?" Blake asks, nodding at the baby grand glimmering in the back of the restaurant.

"Of course," Maka answers, a secret smile curving her lips. "The three of us used to be so popular with the locals." She pauses, smile fading before she continues, "I wish Wes could be here, too."

Pain shoots through his chest, memories of the stilted smile on his brother's face when he asked Soul to _please come to the competition_ tearing through his mind, of the bitterness that stung him at the thought that this would just mean another title for his parents to brag about, another trophy for Maka to dance around the room with in celebration. He couldn't bear to witness another _stellar_ performance by his _genius_ older brother, so he'd changed his mind at the last minute after having finally promised Wes he'd go.

"Yeah," he mumbles aloud, clenching his fists to stop the trembling. "'S'not something I really want to talk about." The table goes quiet, troubled eyes looking at him, and god, does _everyone_ pity him? So what if he lives alone, the final living relic of a dying musical bloodline? So what if he lost his entire family? He's not a goddamn porcelain doll.

An older woman approaches the table, breaking this train of thought. "You two used to come in here a lot, didn't you?" she asks, smiling at Soul and Maka. "Me and my husband used to love listening to you play. Do you think you'd be willing to do another little ditty, for old times' sake?"

Liz and Blake exchange glances, brows drawn, but Soul has had _enough_ pity for one day. "Yeah, sure thing. We'll play," he says, shrugging out of Blake's hand on his shoulder and belatedly looking to see if Maka even cares enough to go along with him. But she's already twisting in her seat to pull out her violin case, all smiles and determination and that special kind of laser focus she'd always applied to music.

Soul realizes this will be the first time he's played in public since the accident, but brushes the thought aside. He'll show them that there's nothing to _feel sorry for_ here.

But as they approach the piano, footsteps loud in unison along the floorboards, Soul feels doubt muddle the white-hot spite that propelled him back to the piano - is it really the right time for this? What if he's terrible? What if he can't remember how to play and everyone looks at him with those shrewd, calculating eyes like they're trying to figure out why _he's_ the one who lived?

His clenched fist is loosened by small, warm fingers lacing between his own, and he looks to see Maka's hand intertwined with his. "Don't worry," she whispers, voice as quietly commanding as it always has been. "You have me." Something stutters in his chest at the power in her gaze, something awakens in him at her touch, and before he can process it further, she's standing by the piano bench facing the restaurant, violin poised on her chin.

"When you're ready."

He slides onto the bench, cold ivory gleaming beneath his shaking fingertips. What was he thinking - he _can't_ do this, can't _fuck up_ again, can't give Nightmare Wes more fodder than he already has. Breathing is suddenly difficult, air seeming to leak from his lungs rather than fill them, and black spots swim across his vision in the shrinking restaurant. Sweat makes his hands slick and his cursory brush against the keys leaves them damp. Why did he have to run his useless mouth _again_ , why-

A lone note, G, sings from her violin. It startles him out of his spiraling self-deprecation, and she peeks at him over her shoulder. _Go_ , her eyes seem to tell him, a forest fire burning deep within. _Play._

He plays.

Fingers long unused skitter across the keys to the accompanying tune of an old piece they'd used as a warm up. Except it's different somehow, harder, less a pleasant afternoon at the park than a call to arms, and Soul is swept away in her energy. He meets her when she fiddles with the tempo, predicts her take on the reprise, and all of a sudden it's like they're eleven again, playing in Soul's parents' practice hall while Wes supervised. When he hears her slow, just a bit, he takes the lead on a whim and bangs out a small, yet complimentary, solo piece. Grinning at him sidelong, she flings in some heart-pounding vibrato before moving into a ringing crescendo. She's breathing heavily, Soul is panting, and he wonders what exactly is transpiring between them as their sounds begin to meld and merge into one-

Silence.

Silence greets him like a cold winter's night, a sudden vacuum in his chest when he can no longer hear, or worse, _feel_ , the music he's making. Her sound rings sweet and true in his ear, but his fingers might as well be tapping on felt for all the noise he hears from himself.

He should have known this would happen.

The accident left him with scars on his heart like sutures, small, aching knots that he can never quite seem to work out. They make him lose the music he creates - but only what _he_ creates, and he knows it must be some sort of punishment or divine reckoning for the way he treated his family, treated his brother, before they passed, because what _else_ could he have done to deserve this?

Focus. _Breathe._ Let the music flow out, just like Mother taught. Soul tries to relax and focus on Maka's sound and Maka's tempo to guide him through the remainder of the song, but it's so damn hard when his breath comes in rasping gulps and other sounds, like the hard scuffing of chairs on wood as people stand to get a better look, are heightened to his overstimulated ears. He bites his lip until it bleeds and the tangy, metallic warmth reminds him that he's still an Evans, no matter how defective, and that comes with all the skill borne from late nights practicing until his eyes swam and his hands cramped, and then an hour more. Music used to be his escape, his gift, and so help him he will _not_ let Maka leave him behind.

Frantic hands continue to jump across the keys in what he can visually recognize as the proper chords, ears straining as he tries to keep up with her tempo and rhythm. There's something familiar about it, though, something comforting in the way she glances at him out of the corner of her eye and flutters the high notes so capriciously. But it reminds him of how she used to play for Wes, and then his hands begin to feel heavy with familiar, soul-sucking apathy - even when they were _friends_ , he was never trusted with her music, with her sound. She saved that all for his brother.

These thoughts are clearly interfering with his game of charades, though, because he sees Maka tense and glance at him more often, shifting her style to something more traditional for the song instead of the personal twist she'd started with. No, no, _no;_ he can _do_ this, he can not fuck up one goddamn thing on this Earth just _once_. Soul attacks the keys with a vengeance, sweat dripping down his neck as he frantically tries to connect the chords he thinks accompany her slowing melody. It's gotta be a C here-no, wait, next came G- _fuck_ , was this where he had to pause?

Like an old, rotted tree finally succumbing to decay, Soul crashes his way through the end of the song. Maka salvages their performance with some fancy finger work and an upbeat twist on the traditionally more dramatic ending, but Soul can already feel everyone's eyes on him, wondering what happened to the youngest Evans who'd had _so much potential._ He can practically hear their sneering thoughts ( _such a shame he never kept up with it; I guess all the talent died with his family_ ), and the force of his self-loathing nearly flattens him. Bitterly, he wonders how he can even be surprised when this was clearly the only outcome possible. Guess he really _does_ need babying, someone to make sure little Soulie doesn't trip and shatter again; _god_ why did he mess up so badly, why couldn't he do this _one thing_ right for _once_ in his _life_ -

"Soul?" Maka turns to look worriedly at him, a faint sheen of sweat glistening on her forehead in the low lighting. "Are you okay?"

The room is spinning again, quiet chatter from the audience swirling around him in a devastating mantra of _you failed._ He brings a shaking hand to his face, feels cold slickness beneath his fingers while blood from his bitten lip spills over and trickles down his chin.

"Soul." Her voice barely reaches him, mental static buzzing loudly in his head. He musters enough energy to loll his head to the side just in time to see her place her violin in its case.

Tenderly, she nudges the neck into place, runs a hand down its polished belly, clips the bow securely to the lid. Pausing for just a moment, she latches the case closed while something like regret ages her features.

Soul looks away, uncomfortable at the rawness of her expression. Playing is still clearly important to her, and, once again, he's getting in the way of it.

Instrument safely in hand, she walks over and tugs on a strand of his hair, once, twice, just like she used to. "Come on, let's take a walk."

Thoughts dulled, he shrugs and lets her tow him out of the restaurant past the many eyes and whispered conversations that pursue them like a dirge. He follows, not because he thinks he'll find any more peace out on the streets with their chipper, functioning people, but because anything is better than being skewered by the identical look of pity in Blake and Liz's eyes.

The world outside is both sudden and soothing after the fading, stinging whispers of The Black Room. Maka leads him down a side street to a small park dotted with shrubs and patches of bleeding hearts before gesturing to a busy courtyard. "There's a nice park this way. I was hoping we could talk for a bit."

He just stares at her, noticing different hues in the purple-blue palette of bags under her eyes and the small tic in her right hand she stops by making a fist.

Smiling, a small, tired twitch of the lips, she begins to walk down the path and stops only when he doesn't follow.

"Hold on," he calls, running a still-shaking hand through his hair. "You just _show up_ , just like that? After being gone for _how_ many years?" The air around him shimmers in the midday heat, making the walls appear to melt and twist in on themselves in the perfect surreal backdrop to this whole trainwreck of a day, because what other than a hallucination could explain Maka materializing from god knows where and talking to him like they haven't spent a day apart?

She winces slightly, hands flitting into fists and then relaxing so quickly he thinks it's all part of whatever fucked up trip he's on. "Six years, four months, and five days," she answers quietly.

Her precise count catches him off guard. "Still, why now? High school's almost over. You're just gonna leave again for college at the end of the year."

A bitter edge twists her smile into a grimace. "College is still a while off. I have some unfinished business here, that's all." She meets his gaze, eyes harder than before but still full of a fierce energy that fills her entire being and, somehow, awakens an answering thrum in him _._ Even that small flicker of emotion, that little tug on some deep part of him that has been tethered to her for as long as he can remember, sets his heart ablaze after years of nothing but bone-deep exhaustion.

It's a dangerous way to feel.

"Yeah, well, what's that got to do with me?" Soul crosses his arms and waits, hoping that she won't be able to answer so he can brush this encounter off as a small deviation from his usual routine of not giving a shit.

"Well, considering you're going to be my partner for the Death City Open, a whole lot." She stares him down, defiance and pride and something that makes his heart clench in her gaze, and Soul marvels at how easily she can unbalance him. Maybe it's just another defect of his.

"Since when am I doing anything?" Soul asks harshly. "You heard me play just now - you'd have to be _crazy_ to want me to accompany you."

Her eyes narrow dangerously. "What I _heard_ was my best friend playing like his heart has been ripped to pieces." She stops abruptly, mouth snapping shut with a sharp click, and takes a deep breath.

Soul registers two things quickly: she's just as able to read his music as she had been six years ago, and she still considers him her best friend. Funny, when the last thing she'd said to him was, "See you tomorrow." Funny, when she never talked to him again.

"Best friend, huh?" he says quietly, long-dormant embers of anger flaring to life with an intensity that surprises him. "What kind of _best friend_ leaves without a goodbye? What kind of _best friend_ doesn't call or text or write and just drops off the face of the earth?"

Maka visibly deflates and curls in on herself, pale hair falling over her face as she nods. "You're right. I shouldn't have left so suddenly. Did-" She looks at him cautiously. "Did Wes never tell you?"

"Tell me what?" As if he needs another reminder of how she only stuck around for Wes. Wes, who looked at her with a sparkle in his eyes only outshone by the answering glimmer in hers, Wes who played such achingly beautiful music for her when Soul was supposed to be out of the house but stayed behind anyway. How dare she come back now, _after_ the ashes have been scattered.

"I left because he suggested a good music high school." Her eyes are impossibly sad, faraway and overflowing with regret. "I applied so late that I only got my acceptance a few days before I had to be there, so it was very hectic at the end. But he said-he promised he'd tell you where I was going."

Time slows down, thick and slimy like molasses as he processes her words. She left because of _Wes?_ "Still, after the-after what happened, I thought, I'd hoped-" He stops himself before he can say too much; it's all still too raw for her to see how vulnerable he is. "I'd thought that after everything you'd at least _call._ "

Maka looks like she's been struck before her eyes glint fiery evergreen and Soul takes an unconscious step back. "I did call you. I was...sick, for a few weeks before and after the funeral, but then I called you for _a week straight_ and either a maid answered or it just rang for twenty minutes without being picked up and _you better believe I stayed on the line for that long each time_."

He snorts. "Sick. Right."

Soul watches as the fight drains out of her and the slant of her mouth turns bitter, as her tone weighs heavy with sadness. "I thought that since I wasn't able to come to the funeral, you wouldn't want anything to do with me."

This is too much. Her being here like this, her velvet lies, the way her shoulders slump and how she looks so small - it's too much. "Yeah, well, you were wrong."

He turns around and begins walking back to the restaurant, its patrons' cold stares more appealing at this point than anything to do with _her._ The pavement is hard under his feet and he focuses on that instead of the way her voice hitches when she yells after him to _wait_.

After the funeral and having to deal with sympathetic smiles in varying degrees of sincerity, he'd sat by the phone for hours so he wouldn't miss the call he knew she'd make. Hours turned to days turned to weeks until he created a voicemail box just for her, re-recording it six times until his voice stopped shaking and he snuffed out the hopeful lilt in his tone. One day, as he walked by and saw the blinking red zero glowing back at him, he simply unplugged it.

He'd waited enough.


	2. Your magnetic north

The first day of school dawns with hazy clouds and a sun that's always too bright. Soul watches it creep above the horizon with a consistency and steadiness he envies after another night without sleep.

He lingers in the shower, turning the temperature hotter and hotter until tears mix with the water sluicing down his face and he's panting with the effort to endure its punishing heat. When it's really too much to bear, he turns the faucet off and takes a moment to look at himself in the mirror - red, red, always so much _red_ \- before toweling off and throwing on a tee shirt with some fraying jeans. After taking a few steps and nearly tripping as his pants slide down below his hips, he grabs a belt and cinches it to its smallest hole.

Dressed and mostly presentable, he wanders through the house until he ends up in the kitchen, stares blankly at the pantry, and drifts towards the garage. He rarely gets hungry before noon anyway - no need to spend the morning nauseous just because it's the first day and _you have to start good habits early, Soul._ His mother's portrait smiles at him from the adjoining hall, next to his father and brother, but he looks studiously at the crease where wall meets floor as he makes his way to the garage.

Weariness pulls at his legs while he nudges up the kickstand and straddles the bike, weighs on his arms as he points the front wheel towards the road. It's going to be a long day.

Just like all the others.

He parks at his usual spot when he arrives at Death City High, the dull chatter of reunited friends grating in the background as he shuffles up the stairs and through the peeling double doors. Belatedly, he pulls out the crumpled letter he somehow remembered to save that has his locker assignment and class schedule and heads toward the locker bay at the end of the hallway.

Chipping green paint and a tarnished brass number plate - number thirteen, of _course_ \- greet him as he dumps his bag on the floor to fiddle with his lock. When he finally manages to get it open, he unlatches the locker and shoves his bag in, pausing for a moment before grabbing a pen from one of its pockets. Guess it couldn't hurt to _seem_ like he's trying, at least on the first day.

He closes his locker with a yawn that quickly becomes a gasping choke because Maka is _right there_ , scant feet away, unmistakable in those combat boots while she digs around in her own chipped green locker.

She slams it closed and then he's staring into green eyes that widen when they meet his, and Soul automatically connects the faint freckles on her cheeks into the constellations Wes had taught them those summer nights when practice lasted far beyond sunset.

Maka recovers faster than he does, stepping into his space and reaching for his hand, all the while pinning him with those _eyes_ that still haven't left his. It feels like she's scanning his very soul, brushing past the cracks and fissures and all the ugliness he's tried to keep inside for so long until she gets a glimpse of him, the real him, not this shell he's currently rotting away in. He shivers under a gaze that shouldn't feel so safe, so _familiar_ , but he can't bring himself to look away.

The bell rings and the spell is broken. Soul spins on his heel and walks in the opposite direction, nearly careening into a couple of broad-shouldered football players but not caring about potential swirlies as long as he gets far, _far_ away from her. Looks like his plan of ignoring her return is going to be a lot harder now that they're practically locker mates, but at least he doesn't have to worry about seeing her in class. She'd always been so clever and studious that the only place that makes sense for her is in the advanced classes, while Soul has barely scraped by enough to get into the next grade.

Morning classes drip by about as slowly as he expected, and he passes the time tracing veins on his arm with an overgrown fingernail, pressing down just hard enough to leave a white afterimage in the wake of the nail.

Lunchtime eventually arrives, and with it the tedious task of finding a place to sit. This is when he'll be most vulnerable to a Maka attack, barring the beginning and end of the day, though he can just come in early and leave late to mitigate _that_ eventuality.

After scanning the cafeteria - no sign of loose blonde hair, so different than the pigtails she used to wear - he finds a seat in the corner where he can properly fade into the background. Right when he takes a bite of his lukewarm chicken patty, he hears the warmth of her laughter from a few tables over and furtively glances her way just as she's sitting down with Tsubaki.

Their eyes meet again and he feels that same pull, that same nostalgic safety he's felt each time he'd looked at her. But this time he's ready. With as cold a glare as he can muster while vaguely aware that he's really just trying to look deeper into her eyes, he breaks eye contact and stalks toward the hallway, deciding to wait out the lunch wave under the staircase by the band room. It's unsettling, really, how _close_ she still feels to him after her abrupt reappearance, like all those nights spent avoiding eye contact while they poured their souls into their sound actually _meant_ something.

He snorts into the last bite of his chicken patty and gathers his books - if he'd _meant_ something to Maka, well, she would have shown him. Actions speak louder than words, right? The bell rings again and he trudges to his next class, idly wondering how long he should loiter after last period to be sure Maka isn't anywhere near the lockers.

He gets an answer after he spends an hour skulking in the band room pretending to fiddle with the piano. Once he's relatively sure most people who aren't involved with after-school sports have left, he heads to his locker to get his bag and go home.

A folded over post-it note flutters to the floor when he opens the locker, and he stoops to pick it up. There, unsigned but in an unmistakably precise hand are simply the words _I'm sorry._

He crumples the note without a second thought and tosses it into the trash. It's far too late for apologies, and, as Wes is so keen to remind him each night-

Sorry isn't good enough.

/

And so begins his new routine.

Every morning there's a new post-it in his locker, and every morning he throws it away unread. The process repeats itself each afternoon once he's peered cautiously around the corner to make sure she hasn't taken to waiting for him, but so far, she seems to respect his unstated but pretty clearly demonstrated desire to be left the fuck alone. There's always a twinge of curiosity to see if she's written anything other than the _I'm sorry_ that was on the first one, but he resists the urge to look by telling himself whatever she has written doesn't change the past.

This goes on for a week, and then another, and another, until he greets the third month of school with the same indifferent shrug with which he went into the first. When he gets to school and opens his locker, his hand automatically rises to catch the note that always falls out, except this time one doesn't. Squinting, he checks under his binders and even furtively nudges aside his bag to make sure he didn't cover it, but his locker looks exactly like it did last Friday after he discarded her afternoon post-it.

By all rights, he should be happy about this development. Ecstatic even, since dealing with the notes has required him to use energy he barely has - but here he is, rooting around his mess of a locker trying to find it. Even though he's never read them, they've become something to look forward to in the same begrudging way one looks forward to going grocery shopping or removing a splinter. He gives his locker one final once-over to make sure he didn't miss it in the unmitigated catastrophe of school supplies and loose paper before he heads off to class.

Maybe there will be one this afternoon.

He catches himself glancing at the clock every fifteen minutes until last period lets out and then, with little conscious thought, he heads to the locker bay on time for the first time since the school year started. Really, there's no reason for him to do so, especially since he _doesn't care_ whether or not she's there, but when he turns the corner his heart leaps in his throat.

She's in front of his locker with another stickie note clutched in her hand, and with a small pang, Soul notices that it's shaking slightly. He watches her while she stares at his locker, unmoving, as the tide of students eager to leave cascades around her. Her shoulders rise and fall abruptly and she takes a quick step towards his locker, the arm holding the note rising to the thin slats by the number plaque.

But then she stops.

Her arm falls limp at her side, the note slips to the tips of her fingers as her grip relaxes, and she turns to the same garbage bin he's become so well acquainted with these last few months. She holds it up and looks at it for a few seconds before letting it drop down on top of the other trash. And then she's gone.

Soul releases the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, thoughts racing. Did she really care _that much_ about those notes? He walks over to the trash where she'd placed the one she almost gave him today and gingerly takes it out.

It says _I'm so, so sorry_ in that neat hand, and something unfurls inside him. Between this note and the way she moved like she was sleepwalking, he begins to wonder if maybe it'd be worth it to hear what she has to say. But it's hard, so hard, to look past the biting hurt of being all but abandoned by her, his supposed best friend, and left to pick up the pieces of his family's deaths alone.

He wavers there, in front of the garbage bin, unsure of what he actually wants versus what his pride tells him he deserves. Perhaps against his better judgement, he pockets the note before gathering his bag from his locker so he can head home and sleep off this bewildering day.

The note feels heavy in his pocket on the drive home, but also, inexplicably, warm.

/

There's no post-it in his locker the next morning either, though after what he saw the other afternoon, he's not really surprised. He'd considered going in at a regular time to catch her before classes, but he doesn't know what he'd say. Doesn't know why he even kept that last note, either, but there it is burning a hole in his pocket as he walks to first period, and he's gotta figure something out soon because he almost walked into the bathroom instead of the biology room and _why does he even care about this?_ Stopping dead in his tracks, Soul takes a very careful, very measured breath and turns toward the science wing so that he can deal with classes and then figure out what to do about his conflicting feelings regarding Maka.

The day passes quickly enough, all things considered - he has a miniature heart attack every time he sees anyone with blond hair out of the corner of his eye, but that can't be helped, really - and then the final bell signals the end of the day and he's swimming through a mass of students to reach the lockers before she leaves.

He turns the corner and there she is, cramming a small library's worth of books into a backpack that might as well be a duffel bag given the size of it, hair spilling over her face so she can't see him as he approaches. All of the half-formed greetings and ice-breakers die in his throat when she glances up at him.

A kaleidoscope of emotion swirls too quickly in her eyes for him to make sense of anything, but then her face hardens into the cool, aloof mask he recognizes from the times she'd used it on her father or anyone else she didn't want to talk to.

"Hey." He doesn't really know what to say after the way he's snubbed her, so he hopes she'll be able to tolerate him long enough to come up with something better than 'sorry I was a jerk, I would actually like to be friends.'

"Hi." Her entire body is tense, and the cautious way she looks at him reminds him he needs to be careful with how he proceeds.

He takes a deep breath. "So, I know you've been trying to get in touch-"

"Yeah, forget about that. I'm sorry I bothered you." She shoves a final book into her backpack before shouldering it and striding towards him as if she'll breeze right through him, but he shoves a hand into his pocket and holds out the note she almost left him like a talisman.

Her eyes widen. "That's-" Glancing at him, she snatches it from his hand and flips it over a few times as if to make sure it's real before looking at him with a rawness he wasn't expecting. "You actually read it?"

The incredulity in her voice gouges him. "Yeah, I did. Look, I'm-What did you wanna talk about? Before."

She straightens herself and looks at him, jaw clenched. "I wanted to start over. I wanted to see if you were willing to be friends, but you made it pretty clear that you weren't, and that's fine, I get it, but just-don't come antagonize me, okay? Ignoring me was working out just fine." She starts to turn around, and without thinking, Soul reaches out and hooks his index finger around her pinky. The contact sends a jolt through his entire body, the way it feels when you're almost asleep and you feel like falling, and she turns her head sharply at him, eyes wide and mouth half-open.

"I wanna try." The words come without thinking, and the moment he says them the tangled buzzing in his mind quiets and is replaced by the kind of stillness he only experiences on those rare nights he doesn't have a nightmare.

Maka gives him a cautious look. "But why the sudden change of heart? You've been avoiding me since school started."

Soul puts his free hand on the back of his head, at a loss for words because he has the same question. "I never really gave you a chance to say anything," he says slowly, looking past her at the bright comic sans lettering on a nearby bulletin board. "I guess I wanna change that."

Maka glances down to their joined hands and then to the note he salvaged. "I really am sorry I wasn't here, you know," she says quietly, eyes dim and swirling with an intensity he doesn't understand. "And I really did try calling you after I heard about the accident, but you never picked up. I gave up after a couple weeks, thinking you wanted nothing to do with me." She laughs tiredly and unhooks her hand from his before taking a half step back. "How about we start over? Not all the way over, obviously, but back to when we could stand to be in the same room as each other."

Soul winces slightly at that but nods, shuffling his feet uncomfortably because he hadn't thought this far ahead - what does he say, how does he _act_ now?

Luckily Maka is a step ahead, bridging the space between them with an outstretched hand and a smile that seems almost relieved. She doesn't step closer, though, nor try to grab his hand where it's hovering awkwardly in the same position she released it; instead she just waits for him to meet her in the middle. It's comforting, somehow.

Her grip is firm when he finally takes her hand, the roughness of her calluses sending small tingles up his arm and reminding him how dedicated she's always been. Something pokes him as she releases her grip and Soul glances at his hand to see her note crinkled into his palm.

"All right, I have to get going now, but I'll see you tomorrow." She flashes him a smile, full and genuine and filled with promise, before turning and walking towards the exit.

He watches the door slip shut behind her, bars of golden sunlight illuminating the dust that can never quite be kept under control, and then looks back at the note she returned to him. Tomorrow, huh? He pockets the note again and gathers his bag from his locker before following her out of the building, wondering why he hasn't noticed before how bright the needles on the pine trees are against the wide open sky.

/

"So, about you being my accompanist in the Death City Open."

Soul closes his locker, the small sound of the lock catching barely audible over the background chatter. Ever since they got back on speaking terms, Maka's been stubbornly nagging him to play with her in this upcoming competition and he has been just as stubbornly deaf to her requests.

"For the hundredth time, no," he mumbles, turning his back to her and walking away.

"But it makes so much sense!" She's walk-skipping to keep up with his long strides but still undeterred, her voice strong and even as she once again argues her case. "We've played together before. It wouldn't take so long to get back into practice since we know so much about how we each play."

Soul sighs. "Are you kidding me? That day in The Black Room was the first time I'd played in front of people since the accident. I don't even know how _I_ play anymore, let alone _you."_

"Well, then that's why we need to practice. The sooner the better, too, because the competition is in January, and that's only two months away."

"I said I don't want to." It's hardly a whisper, just the barest hum of sound, but Maka stops talking and Soul feels years of repressed loneliness corrode his apathy like battery acid. "Look, I know you think you know how we'd play, but it's been so many years that we're pretty much strangers again."

Her jaw tightens and she straightens up, mouth open and eyes flashing, before she takes a deep breath and remains silent.

She shouldn't have anything to say, after all. The boy she knew and the almost-man he is now are the same person only in name, and it irks him that she presumes to know otherwise. What could she possibly understand about the stabbing guilt that's sewn to him like a shadow, the special agony of waking in the same bed he and his brother used to jump on during pillow fights or hide under during Maka's terrifying reign in hide and seek?

Does she know what it's like to live inside a tomb?

"Just drop it, all right?" Soul makes to move around her, but she reaches out to grab his hand.

"Wait." A small tremor runs through her hand like she pricked herself on a needle. "You're right. I'm sorry for being too pushy. I just thought that, well, since we both learned from Wes, we'd both know what it means to truly understand music."

As he opens his mouth to tell her no, music is nothing but a wound that hasn't healed properly, the glint of sunlight in her eyes reminds him of stage lights on a piano. Suddenly he's four and sitting on the piano bench for the first time, poking keys at random and laughing while the sounds fill him up. He remembers how gently Mother held his hands as she positioned them for his first chord, remembers the surge of happiness that galloped through him when he played his first song perfectly, the way Mother smiled so genuinely as his music echoed throughout the hall. Sure, it eventually twisted into something darker, less Evans-worthy, but the moment he'd hit the first key, he'd realized he had found something that could release the kaleidoscope of emotion swirling inside his soul.

"Music _was_ like that for me. _Was._ " He sighs, the thought of playing again sapping what little energy he has. "I'm not who I used to be."

She smiles, though she doesn't meet his gaze. "Yeah, I guess I'm not either."

There's a small silence between them while Soul tries to think of something to say through the heavy gauze that stands between him and his thoughts, and Maka keeps taking small breaths like she's about to speak but doesn't.

"Guess I'll see you later," he hazards after a moment, turning away slowly to head in approximately the right direction for his class. This is not before he catches her staring at his hands with something like regret, and he finds himself looking at them for the rest of the day.

What could she possibly see in them?

/

The remainder of his day is uneventful, and too soon he's opening the heavy oak door his mother had custom-made in England. Dropping his book bag on the floor, he trudges up the winding servant staircase next to the kitchen that lets out on his wing of the house, trailing his fingers along the little wrought-iron detailing that winds around the banister. Most days he can't stomach the usual route, the one that brings him past Wes's door and the small, white handkerchief on the floor beside it. He doesn't have time for ghosts, not today, so he avoids that wing entirely and walks down his musty hallway that's blessedly clear of any remnants of the past.

Returning to the quiet dark of his room is only a small comfort. His world has been nudged by Maka's return, tipped on its axis, and part of him is still reeling. It's almost like he's been thrust into a perverse alternate reality where he gets to enjoy Maka's company at the cost of Wes's life. Soul squirms internally, the relief that she didn't leave for good clashing with the acidic guilt that Wes will never get to see her smile reach her eyes again. Wes deserves to see it far more than the Evans leftovers.

Thinking of them together reminds him of the many hours Maka had spent here. They'd all been so close, playing together and talking and taking pictures-

Pictures. They'd taken so many, the three of them, enough that some are probably still lying around.

He throws off his school clothes and shrugs into an old shirt and sweatpants, kicking aside yellowing staff paper as he makes his way to his desk. Setting aside a pile of empty takeout containers, he rummages through a few drawers before carefully drawing out an old manilla folder graffitied with musical staffs, a violin bow, and various emoticon faces. Hesitant fingers run down its length before he musters the courage to open it up and take a look.

Faded polaroid photos are mixed in with bits of paper and small drawings, all curling with age. He picks up the first one, unable to stop the wistful smile it summons. It's a perfect tableau, an exquisite snapshot of their friendship. Maka is mid-lunge with a book in one hand and a feral snarl on her face, while Soul's mouth is open in a scream as he clutches her graffitied music book and a sharpie to his chest. That was the first and last time he listened to Blake's advice about how to "make the ladies happy."

Flipping through the other pictures, he's reminded of other small moments. There's the time he tried to bring Maka lunch in the practice room and tripped, spilling sandwiches and milk all over his mother's authentic oriental carpet and Maka's lap. And the day Maka insisted he help her practice putting makeup on by letting her put it on him first. He's still confused about why she was so grumpy after she'd finished; it's not his fault his eyelashes are so thick.

As he flips past another photo, a piece of paper falls from the pile and flutters to the ground. It's ratty and written in a narrow, angular hand Soul recognizes as his own. He almost drops it again once he reads through half of the notes scrawled across the page.

It's the song he wrote for her.

Or at least started to write for her. He's not exactly sure when it all began, whether it was something she'd said or done, but one day he'd begun to notice small things about her. Like the difference between her smile for his parents and her smile for Wes, or the way she'd hold her bow when she was happy or sad or angry. Each new observation had filled his heart with a curious, satisfying warmth, and soon he found himself treasuring each new discovery.

Writing music was the natural way for him to handle this feeling, since words were decidedly out of the question, and he'd needed _something_ to distract himself from replaying her laughter over and over again in his mind. After a year or so of tinkering with it, Soul had gone to bed one night (after a jittery pep talk from himself) with the intention to play it for her after school.

The next day, Maka had asked to be Wes's music partner.

He crumples the page in his hands and throws it across the room where it almost immediately gets lost somewhere between a pile of old clothing and a molding pizza box. Who cares about the rhythmic tune she inspired in him anyway, or how often it'd be buzzing in the back of his mind while she practiced, somehow always the perfect accompaniment to whatever she was playing? That's over, done with, shoved into the same box with plans to finally let Wes teach him how to ski and the promise he made to his mother that he'd play at their thirtieth wedding anniversary.

The sun is still low on the horizon when he kicks off his dogeared Converse and falls into bed, counting the watermarks in the ceiling until the fatigue that's always tugging at his consciousness pulls him under.

/

Light, airy notes drift from his piano while he and Maka sit in the practice hall, the sun saturating everything with rich, golden light. His baby grand glimmers, dignified in its sultry tones, while Soul dances his hands across the keys. He's playing for her, he realizes, images of scrawled music notes flitting through his mind before her head on his shoulder banishes all else from his thoughts.

Stifling a yawn, she leans further into Soul until the heat of her arm against his becomes distracting, and he softens the song to something more tender, something closer to the sensation of wholeness that has crept so silently into the space between his ribs. Maka makes a small noise against him, so he shifts slightly to get a look at her. "What was that?" he murmurs, the unwrinkled expanse of her forehead a siren call to his lips.

Her eyes open. They're red.

A sea of shark teeth glitter in his vision as she unhinges her jaw, chin dipping to her chest with a grotesque _crack_. She leans back, mouth gaping, and Soul just manages to twist to the side so that she latches onto his shoulder instead of his jugular. Pain explodes through his body as she bites down hard and shakes him like a ragdoll, his blood splattering on the dissolving floor.

 _But this is what you wanted._ Her voice echoes in his head, the room around them fading into nothingness while he struggles to breathe, struggles to speak. _Now we can be together._

The pressure is suddenly gone from his neck, and he gets one deep breath before she's digging her hands into the bite wound, stretching and pulling it apart like she wants to peel the skin from his bones. Crooked smile twisting her face, she pulls him down to the ground and steps one foot into his exposed neck, then the other. _Wes can't have me when I'm in you, right?_

Soul claws at his throat, trying not to let her enter, but he's too late. His skin expands like bubblegum as she stretches it and slides inside. There's a beat of silence, a long exhale.

Scythe blades rupture the skin of his arms, tear his fingers to shreds while he screams and falls to the ground, body writhing as it goes through cycle after cycle of transformation. _That's a good boy,_ Maka croons from inside him. _Be the weapon that destroys the competition._

"I don't want to!" he yells, voice hoarse and eyes screwed shut.

 _But Soul, you already are._

He opens his eyes in time to see his arms transform once more, just as Wes walks up to him like nothing is wrong.

"Hey bro," Wes says. "How 'bout a hug before I go get that trophy?" He flings his hands wide, smile warm and inviting, while Soul's own bladed arms jerk up like they're attached to a puppeteer's strings. _You've got scissors for arms!_ Maka laughs inside him.

Terror roils in his gut as he gurgles, "Don't-!"

He's always too late.

Cut clean in half from his embrace, Wes slides to the ground with a sick thump. Soul clutches his face with now human hands, howling to drown out Maka's mad giggles bouncing around his mind.

 _Told you._

Soul wakes with a gasp, drenched in sweat and swallowing hard to hold down the bile burning in his throat. _Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth._ He focuses on his breathing for a few minutes while he lets the terror of his nightmare recede like stormwater after a hurricane.

The red digits of his alarm clock inform him that it's 3:32 AM.

Quietly, he lies back down, settling in to wait for the sun to paint his room a muted gray.

/

Predictably, the rest of his day passes in a sleep-deprived haze, faces and sounds blurring into an incomprehensible mass of _fuck off._ It's only when he's staring blankly at the wall after his last class that he realizes the bell rang twenty minutes ago and he can go home. He gathers his books on autopilot and makes his way towards his locker, listening to the faint echoes of his footsteps in the empty hall.

Just as he passes another hallway, he hears the sharp sound of a violin from one of the rooms further down. A piercing melody pulls at the core of his being, ethereal and haunting, and he changes course to head towards the source of the music. There's something familiar about it, something in the bittersweet harmony and sweeping low notes that fills him with a special kind of longing.

He listens for only a few minutes before the music cuts off and he hears rapid footsteps approaching the door. There's no time for him to duck into another classroom, so he prepares a quick lie about having forgotten something in the room when a pair of narrowed green eyes greets him in the doorway.

Apparently, he hadn't been as quiet as he thought.

Maka blinks at him, relaxing slightly when she sees who it is. "Soul? What are you doing here?"

"I-" What _is_ he doing here? People play music all the time after school for band or orchestra practice and he's never felt inclined to see who it was before. "I was just walking by," he finishes lamely, internally cringing at how weak that sounds but also baffled that he cares at all what she thinks of him.

She looks at him consideringly. "Well, since you're here, come in." Before he can protest or come up with something lame to get himself out of this unplanned human interaction, Maka has turned away and walked back to gather her violin and bow. "Might as well hear it the way it's meant to be heard." She gestures with a nod to one of the chairs in the room and Soul takes a seat, irritated that he's actually interested in what she might play. So much for not caring.

"What are you going to play?" he asks, more to get his own curiosity under control before it devolves into something like emotional investment than because he actually cares which dead composer he might hear.

Her smile doesn't reach her eyes when she turns back towards the music stands where her violin rests on a nearby chair. "Something original I've been working on. You wouldn't have heard it before." After a small breath, she closes her eyes and is perfectly still for two beats before beginning to play with an explosiveness that startles him.

Joyful, upbeat tones sing from Maka's violin, painting the room in the warm reds and oranges of a sunrise. It's like her sound seeps into his bones and settles there, fitting into the pattern of his soul as easily as her bow slides across the strings. Short, staccato bursts fill the room, splattering blues and greens along the walls of his heart as her fingers dance nimbly along the violin's neck. Her sound is both uplifting and powerful, a dragon on the wing, and he lets himself get swept away in the torrent.

She sparkles, he realizes belatedly, watching her body flow and sway with her bowing arm. Her music sparkles. Back when he used to play with Wes, his brother would always tell him about the moment passion collides with music, how it'd shimmer like sunlight passing through a fine mist. Soul had never understood that, never thought that music could be so _colorful_ , yet here he is, feeling more than seeing the bright golds and electric greens she coaxes out of her violin. The hues whisper to him in a language he can't name but implicitly understands as they rush through his veins in a radiant, molten spectrum.

Her pace slows, less an energetic red or yellow and more a somber navy blue, as night falls in her song. Small bursts of double-time notes remind him of twinkling stars, and it's only when the burning in his chest forces him to cough that he realizes he hasn't breathed since she started. He's still trying to catch his breath when Maka drags her bow across the strings in a final, unsettling note, and, eyes still closed, exhales and settles heavily into the chair behind her. "What do you feel?"

He's tempted to say 'everything' because right now he's like a shaken snow globe, fragments of emotion swirling erratically as he grips his chair to get a handle on himself. "I don't know," he finally croaks, surprised by the lump in his throat. "The way you played-something about it reminded me of Wes."

"Ah, I see," she says, smiling again, but this time Soul sees something bitter in it. His heart leaps; is she sick of being compared to him too? "Is that a good thing?"

"Yeah. You-" he pauses, struggling to find the words. "You sound colorful," he blurts.

The clock ticks louder than it should on the wall behind him. Wind blows tree branches to scrape against the windowpanes. But mostly, it's the blood pounding in his ears that beats out the expanding seconds between his ridiculous outburst and any response from her. Nervous that he's _once again_ made an ass of himself, he clears his throat to explain his unconventional answer when a large grin makes the corners of her eyes crinkle in a way that makes his heart stutter.

"What a relief. I was beginning to think my music had lost its spirit." She looks fondly at her violin for a moment before turning away to carefully put it back in its case, and her hand remains on it after she's closed the clasp like she doesn't want to let it go.

Soul doesn't know what to say, memories of sunny afternoons in the practice hall listening to her pull such effervescent sound from the violin at odds with her apparent insecurity in her music.

"You know, Wes always used to say that the mark of a true musician was when their music struck that place deep inside, the soul or the spirit or whatever it is that makes people sigh at sunsets and cry over art. He said once you do that to someone, embed your sound into the core of their being so they can't shake it, then you've changed them. From that point on, they walk around and live their lives with that sliver of you sewn into them, influencing, maybe, the clothes they buy or where they eat, and that affects other people in this giant cascading wave that started from just a few notes, and - don't you think that's kind of like living forever?"

"Forever?" Soul shakes his head and stands up, grabbing his bag from the floor. "You can't live forever and why would you _want_ to in a world that doesn't give a fuck about anyone? Music isn't anything special - it's just noise in a certain order."

He steps towards the door, fully intending to leave, except then she says, "You felt it, though, didn't you? Musicians like us, we don't forget what it's like to move people."

Soul stops in the doorway, suddenly feeling, again, the weight of his loss. "I've never moved anyone with my music," he mutters before walking down the hallway towards the parking lot so he can go home and sleep for the rest of the day.

He's not sure whether the ache in his chest is because she gives him space, or because he doesn't want her to.


	3. The veins of you, the veins of me

Soul stares at his exam grade, the blood red of Stein's pen seeming more disappointed than anything else as it marks a neat 25 in the top corner of the page.

"This is the second test of the year on which you've gotten below a 50," Mr. Stein says, leaning back in his wheeled chair and steepling his fingers. "If you don't start studying and doing the work, I'm afraid I'm going to have to recommend you be held back a year. I know this isn't the only class you're failing."

The clock ticks loudly in the room as Soul remains quiet, both unwilling and unable to come up with a suitable response. So what if he's failing? It's not like he has a plan for after high school anyway.

"I think it'd be best for you to get a tutor," Mr. Stein continues, twisting to grab a sheet of paper from the stack on his desk by his feet. "I think perhaps Ox, or maybe Killik would help you to get things back on track and-"

"I'll take him."

Both Mr. Stein and Soul look to the classroom door to find Maka standing there, up to her chin in what looks to be a giant stack of science magazines.

"Ox is busy tutoring Kim, and Killik and Harvar have sports duties on top of their academic load," she continues, striding up to drop the magazines on Mr. Stein's desk with enough force that it shakes ominously. "And I just finished with Tsugumi, so I could take someone new."

Mr. Stein looks at her consideringly. "That does make sense," he muses after a moment, tapping a finger to his lips. "All right. You have the job, Miss Albarn. I know Soul will be in good hands with you, and I look forward to his next, _passing_ , grade." He dismisses the two of them with a flick of the wrist and begins sorting the magazines into smaller piles as Maka grabs Soul's hand and leads him out of the classroom.

"What was that all about?" Soul asks when they're down the hall a ways and he can comfortably pull his hand free.

"Exactly what it sounds like. I know you used to dislike school and thought I'd try to help out. I wouldn't want you to be left behind a grade when you're definitely smart enough to move forward."

"I don't know about that," Soul says with a snort, mind wandering to the textbooks gathering dust in his room and the stack of assignments he ignores with great intention.

"I do. So I'll meet you at your place in an hour. Make sure you bring your English, math, and bio textbooks home or you're going to have a lot of Googling to do."

She leaves him still frozen, mouth agape, trying to come up with a socially acceptable excuse to deny her casual self-invitation - and then she calls over her shoulder, offhand, "And I know you don't play sports or participate in any clubs, so don't even think about getting out of it. See you soon."

As her footsteps fade down the hall, Soul jumps at the thought of the empty pizza boxes littering the kitchen and curtains that haven't been drawn in six years - he doesn't quite know why, but the idea of her witnessing how much the house that they both essentially grew up in together has deteriorated makes him nauseous with embarrassment. He sprints to his locker to pick up the required textbooks and runs to his motorcycle, leaping on the seat and firing the ignition in one harried motion.

Guess it's time to clean the house.

/

The doorbell rings, its two-toned chime startling Soul out of his concentrated effort to get the couch cushions angled _just so_. With a final nervous hand through his hair, he marches to the front door and swings it wide, praying that the warm, welcoming smile he's been practicing all afternoon comes out as something other than a grimace. He's still baffled as to why he cares _so much_ about what she thinks about the house, but care he does and damn it all if he isn't going to do whatever he can to stop the wrenching shame from imagining her seeing how he lives.

"Uh, hi Mak- _haa_ ," he coughs, choking on his own saliva from the deep breath he took before opening the door. Why does he have to be the most awkward person on the goddamn planet?

She quirks an eyebrow at him but doesn't mention it. "Okay, well, we have a lot of material to get through, so let's get to it."

Soul takes a closer look at her bag. Scrutinizes the lumps in its pockets. There doesn't appear to be anything remotely violin-like in them. "So you're really _not_ gonna try to convince me to play," he says suspiciously. Having that extra hour to himself had allowed him to come up with myriad reasons as to why she'd want to help him, and the most obvious is that she's trying to butter him up to play with her.

Rolling her eyes, she steps over the threshold and makes a beeline for the library, six years apparently not long enough to affect her memory of the house. "No, I'm not. Besides, you have enough work to do if you just want to graduate. I'll keep my word, Soul. I meant it when I said I wanted to be friends again."

The rest of the trip to the library is made in silence, just the soft patter of their feet on old carpet filling the air. Maka had always loved the Evans' library, its muted scarlet carpeting and golden lamp fixtures lending a regal yet cozy feel to the room and its many small reading nooks.

He watches her quietly to see if she leads them to their old spot, nestled behind a tall black walnut shelf filled to bursting with a mixture of encyclopedias and high fantasy novels - because Maka had become such a part of the Evans household that his parents gave her a bookshelf to curate on her tenth birthday and she'd said, in that determined and straightforward way he's always appreciated about her, that the way things _are_ should always be balanced by the way things _could be_.

Sure enough, Maka walks down the shallow staircase to an open area with heavy oak tables and then up the other side towards an older section of the library where the dark, tall bookshelves lie. There's a small table here and she sets her bag down on it with a heavy thump. "Okay, I figure we can start with math and work our way to English. Unless you want to start with English to get the hard part out of the way?"

"You're _really_ not gonna ask me to play today," he says, unable to hide the surprise in his voice.

Maka shakes her head. "I told you already to forget about that. Besides," and her eyes glint dangerously, "you're going to need all the brain space you can handle for what I have in store for you."

Still somewhat bemused, Soul sits and lets his bag spill open on the floor next to him. "I think you have your work cut out for you, Maka."

She snorts. "I always do, with you."

The next two weeks continue in a similar manner, with Maka heading home after school only to show up at his door a couple hours later with a bookbag the weight of a small child strapped to her back. Soul doesn't notice it until the third or fourth time she slaps her binder down on the table and begins to lecture, but he'd missed routine, missed having someone there to hold him accountable when he skips half of an assignment in favor of going to sleep. The mental cobwebs born from years of practiced un-thinking and un-feeling are hard to sweep away entirely, however, and even though he's glad Maka's back and actually wants to talk to him, he can't shake the feeling that there's still something unresolved between them.

"So you want to put your thesis statement in the introductory paragraph, either very early on or in the last sentence," she says, looking to see if he understands. "It's really not so bad, once you get used to the format."

Soul nods and finshes scribbling down notes, a twinge in his heart whispering that he should be writing _music_ notes instead. It's swiftly silenced.

Maka glances at the clock on the mantle and leans back, arms stretching over her head. "We could take a break if you want. Go for a walk or something."

Soul pauses. Up until now, there's been a fine, yet clearly determined, line in their relationship. She tutors him; he provides books, reading material, and a physical space in which she can escape her overbearing father. Does spending non-school related time together disrupt that delicate balance? "Yeah, sure. Where do you wanna go?"

"We can just walk around the wing. That should be enough to get the blood flowing again."

It's harder than he thought it would be to walk with her past rooms in which they used to share meals or take small naps between practice sessions. He feels vulnerable, exposed, like they're walking down the corridors of his mind instead of his house. When they pass Wes's door, he freezes, wondering if she'll judge him for the dust on the handle or the crumpled handkerchief lying by the entrance, but she just observes with those pensive eyes and keeps walking.

The question of the music competition has been heavy on his mind. Ever since Maka started coming over more frequently, he'd been expecting her to ask him about it, but she's been completely silent on the matter. He knows the date is creeping ever closer and part of him wants to ask if she's found someone else to accompany her.

Most of him is afraid to ask.

Maybe if he could still hear his music, he'd give it more serious consideration. But he's in no condition to play alongside her despite the hope that had glimmered in her eyes when she'd asked and despite the strange, simple friendship she's since offered.

An idea begins to take shape in the back of his mind, a way for him to absolve himself of the guilt he feels for turning her down.

It's simple, really. All she needs to do is listen to him play, hear the demons in his sound, and then she'll know why it's for the best that she finds someone else.

They approach the practice hall and Soul clears his throat to get Maka's attention. "Hey."

Apprehension coils in his gut while she looks at him curiously, wondering what it will be like for her to see the remnants of their childhood laid out like elephant bones, stark and mournful.

"We're right by the practice hall if you wanna take a look." He gestures vaguely to the door on their right.

She hesitates, nods. "I'd like that." At his assent, she moves to stand in front of the room, hand hovering over the brass knob.

A firm shove opens the door.

Tepid air spills lazily over them as they weave among jumbled piles of forgotten books. A few boxes have been left unopened in one corner; in another the torn remnants of sheet music lie scattered. Strewn throughout the room, dust-laden shelves cradle photographs of the past. All of them are facedown.

Maka hardly seems to register this, though, as she wanders to the baby grand at the center of room. Old music magazines and small bits of debris sit atop it like canker sores.

Watching her take in the dull chill of the neglected cover makes Soul ache. He mourns their time together all over again, the hours spent here when it was warm and bright and full of the sound of each other's music.

A piano isn't meant to stay silent.

Moments pass as she stands next to it, one hand lightly touching the film of dust on the lid. Soul is about to say something when she glances back at him over her shoulder, sorrow stark in her eyes. "I'm sorry about your family. I'm sorry I wasn't there."

Somehow her words don't feel like pity, and it's as if she's mourning _with_ him instead of looking down on him - and it's refreshing. He wishes she could have been there too. "What's done is done, right? I'm just going to show you why I can't be your partner."

She's silent for a moment, the crescent moon dimly lighting her from behind. Her eyes gleam when she looks up, and Soul feels his heartbeat stutter. " _Can't,_ hm? Do you remember that night in the conservatory?"

It's like an uppercut to his heart. _Of course_ he remembers. It was the night that he and Maka and Wes had snuck into the music conservatory after hours, free to amuse themselves until morning while their parents thought they were at music camp. They played and played and played until dawn, filling the hall with their laughter and their sounds as unique as fingerprints upon the walls.

And then Soul and Maka had been alone.

Wes had left on a solo mission to nab snacks from the vending machine on the other side of the building, leaving Soul to fidget uncomfortably next to her, the beginnings of what he now recognizes as attraction fluttering in his stomach. They'd shared a moment that he still thinks about with the kind of clarity reserved for last goodbyes or premeditated plans, with details both sharp and slightly distorted by the emotions in which they were exposed.

" _Hey, Soul?" Maka asked, fiddling with her bow. "What do you think the point of music is?"_

 _He snorted. "The point? What, you trying to get all nerdy with music? Come on, it just...is. Some things you can't explain."_

 _This earned him a frosty stare. "If you paid attention in school, Soul, you'd realize that there are_ many _things that can be explained."_

" _Yeah, well, this isn't one of 'em. You just, I dunno, feel the music. That's all."_

 _He should have known the next question was coming. "What do you feel when you play?"_

 _Grimacing, Soul put his hands behind his neck. "Did I miss the memo for Touchy-Feely time or somethin'?"_

" _That's not an answer. I'm just curious, that's all."_

 _The quiet earnestness in her tone defeated him. "I dunno, complete I guess? Like I scratched an itch I can't reach with my hands? It's hard to put into words," he mumbled, blushing faintly. How did Maka always manage to bring out his lame side?_

 _Nodding, Maka said, "I think I feel that, too. Like you're connected to something greater than you, and the sound you make is, well, nourishing. Both for you and your listeners. It feeds something vital, like this invisible organ we all have, and if you neglect it, you just don't quite feel complete." She had looked at him then, and Soul had shivered at the fierceness in her eyes. "I want to reach as many people as possible so they don't also go through life feeling like something's missing."_

 _The subtle dip in her voice, indicative of a tightening throat, made him scoot closer to her on the floor and nudge her with his elbow. "Missing?" he began softly, but then Wes barged in, arms bulging with small, bagged treats. "Tonight, we feast!" he'd proclaimed, and the moment shattered. They never spoke of it again, the question lost between lazy afternoons practicing together and the general flow of life in the Evans house._

 _And then Maka left. Everyone left._

"What does that matter now? Look, Maka, I know you think music's special and all but, well, not everyone does."

"What _is_ music to you, then?" Something intangible swims in Maka's eyes behind the usual determination, and it makes Soul's heart ache because how can she still be so goddamn _stubborn?_ What does it matter whether or not music is special when the world in which it exists is so utterly, inarguably, soul-crushingly _pointless?_

He chooses not to answer. She'll learn soon enough.

Instead, he really and truly looks at the piano for the first time since the day those strange men finished appraising its worth. Dust coats it like polluted snow, bits of debris still clinging from the last time the tuner visited. Another wave of guilt, abrasive and constricting, washes through him, and god - this is why he hasn't been back here, this is why he couldn't open the damn _door_ in over six years and this is why he doesn't deserve to play with Maka. But she's here, expectant, and damn it all if he's not going to at least _try_ to play the way he used to back when he also thought music had a message.

The piano is in no condition to be played just yet, though. He runs a hesitant hand along the fallboard before moving boxes from the lid to the floor and nearly toppling from the weight of it all. Apparently, spending days in bed doesn't do much for one's strength. An old sheet lies crumpled in the corner on one of the shelves, and he grabs it to wipe away the debris from the now boxless lid. Wide, sweeping circles send clouds of dust floating in the air, and each pass reveals more of the polished wood.

Satisfied that it's clean enough, Soul sits on the bench and presses a few experimental keys. Years of disuse make the notes a bit muffled, not as full and round as he remembers, but his parents were nothing if not thorough about hiring a tuner to come like clockwork every six months. Soul may live alone after bribing his aunt with a hefty portion of his inheritance, but he didn't bother changing the accounts his parents set up around groundskeeping and tuning.

It doesn't really matter how in tune the piano is, anyway. It's not like he'll get to hear it for long.

Glancing at Maka, he says, "This should clear everything up."

And he plays.

Soft, mournful chords float from the piano while he warms up and rolls his shoulders. The sound is still there as he trills a few high notes experimentally and flinches at the tinkling sound, decidedly uncomfortable starting what he knows is an ultimately futile process in maintaining anything close to his personal standards of playing. But there's really no other way to explain himself, and music has always been a better language for him to communicate in - at least until this strange deafness stripped him of even that small avenue of expression.

Faster and faster he pushes the tempo, building into a strong crescendo before diving into a waterfall of minor arpeggios, pouring out his frustration at a reality where music has been taken from him. He slams into heavier notes and twists them until they're dark and writhing and tempestuous, _seething_. Anger at himself for being so goddamn _pathetic_ wells in his chest, and he bangs out a harsh glissando to release it. He'd forgotten how cathartic this is, how _good_ it feels to release this long-buried emotion without sleeping or shoving it away. A savage grin ghosts across his features; finally, _finally,_ he can listen to the music that's always been just a few notes away from spilling out of the locked corners of his mind.

Until, of course, he can't.

Life slips back into dull monochrome, and it's almost a relief when the sound fades from his ears. At least now he doesn't have to try anymore, now he can just give up and float, expending as little energy as possible like he's always preferred. Except Maka is looking at him, despair writ large across her features, and Soul considers the possibility that he may have gone too far. Lifeless, his hands slide from the keys as he struggles to come up with some way to apologize.

"That was beautiful," she says, walking over slowly. "But what happened at the end? It was all going so well and then-"

It'll be easier if he just spits it out. "I can't hear it anymore."

She looks at him, nonplussed. "Can't hear..?"

"After the accident, whenever I'd play, the sound would just sort of disappear after a while. I don't know why."

"Oh."

"So, yeah. I definitely can't play with you." He's quiet then, rubbing the back of his neck while he wills the residual awkwardness to go away. There's something hanging in the air between them, something aching and unspoken, and he wishes he could cleanse it. She deserves better than to stagnate in his sick miasma.

"There you go with that _can't_ nonsense again. I know you said you don't want to play anymore and that's fine. If you do, though, I'll help you."

He thinks again of times spent laughing at her when she couldn't tune her violin right at first, or the small moments she'd peek at him over her shoulder while they warmed up and make silly faces until he'd laugh and Father would scold him. So different than staying up all night with a chill his mountain of blankets can't quite smother while he listens to that strange almost-sound of absolute silence.

The small part of him that still stubbornly clings to hope wants to play with her, but the rest of him doesn't think he could handle it. The will to try had been one of the last urges to leave him.

Shifting in his seat, he says, "I'm sorry." Then he stands, closing the fallboard, and the quiet impact echoes with finality.

"I believe you'll hear the music again." Maka's looking at him, compassion bleeding into the determination now firming her features. "But not trying isn't going to get you there."

Soul bristles. "Why does it have to be me, anyway? I'm sure you could find tons of accompanists around here who're way more qualified."

A cloud passes over the moon outside and casts a shadow over her face. "Because you're my friend. And... I promised Wes I'd play with you again."

Soul forces a brittle smile. "Sorry to disappoint you both, then." He breezes past her, calling over his shoulder, "It's pretty late and I'm tired. Thanks for helping me with homework these past few weeks, but I think I get it now. Don't worry about it from now on. See you in school."

"Soul, hold on-"

"Goodnight, Maka."

He waits, leaning against the wall just around the corner, until her footsteps fade down the hall. Then he's sliding down down down until his elbows are on his shins and he's cradling his head in his hands. He sits there for a while, listening for the distant click of the front door shutting. It shouldn't be a surprise that she made a promise like that to Wes; after all, they had been the best duet in town.

The wall is hard and rough against his back while he tries to get his breathing under control, his chest constricting at more than a few shallow breaths. This is fine. Everything's fine. So what if she liked Wes more than him, or even liked Wes as more than just a fellow violinist who'd stay up late to teach her advanced bowing techniques just because she asked? It's not like Soul cares about her as more than just a friend, and he refuses to acknowledge the weird jolt he gets whenever she looks him in the eye as anything other than another sign he's simply emotionally stunted and making up for it with a weird attachment to the first person to show him basic kindness. He rubs his hands, sore from the intensity of his playing, and breathes.

Some time later, he gets up, tugs his shirt straight, and trudges to the bedroom.

/

Thursday dawns innocuously enough, high clouds drifting in lazy patterns that remind Soul of skulls. It's been one month since that night in the practice hall, one month he's spent avoiding Maka like the plague.

One month of nightmares.

Slamming his locker shut, he shoulders his messenger bag and shuffles towards his first period class. It's English, and they're going over the same essay introductions that Maka had showed him so many weeks ago. He almost smiles thinking about what a colossal nerd she must be to get _him_ to understand it, but memories of her stricken face that night, like she'd been slapped, stop him.

Blake is the first to accost him in the hall.

"'Sup brochacho? No no, don't answer, that's what they call a rhetorical question. Thing is, word on the street is Maka has a performance later today and you're not gonna be there with her. What gives?"

Soul sighs and keeps walking. "I can't play anymore. I told you."

"Bullshit, you played just fine at the end of the summer! Heard you myself."

Snorting, Soul says, "Yeah, well, that's like me saying I watched you at a wrestling match. Doesn't mean I could referee one."

"Sure it does! First guy out cold loses. Bam, done. But seriously, you should think about playing with her. Tsu said she was mad bummed the other day."

This grabs his attention. "Maka was talking to Tsubaki about it?"

Blake rolls his eyes. "Uh, _duh_. They're like, biffles or whatever chicks call themselves when they're bros. So go be a good biffle and make some music with her."

Ignoring the other ways that expression could be taken, Soul spots his classroom and makes his escape. "Gotta go, later Blake."

He makes it safely to his first period class without any further interruptions and sighs, happy to be free from his well-meaning but ultimately exhausting friends.

This sense of safety lasts precisely until the moment he walks out of the classroom and sees Liz leaning nonchalantly against a row of lockers.

"Hey, Pianoman. Abandoning your duet partner so soon after she gets back?"

Soul wonders if a person can sigh himself into passing out. "Not you, too. And she was Wes's partner, not mine."

"Hell yeah, me too! What's up with you? You and Maka were so tight. I didn't think you'd wanna leave her out to dry like this."

That one hurts. "I'm not _leaving_ her, I'm doing her a _favor._ You heard me in The Black Room; I completely lost it. I'd just ruin her chances."

"Sorry buddy, but I don't know what you mean. Of course you'll be rusty, but-"

"But nothing. Look Liz, I'm just not ready to play." He turns and makes to bury himself in the flowing tide of students before she can really get going.

"Ready is a state of mind, Soul!" she calls after him.

Memories of scythe blades and bloody violin bows flit through his head. If Liz is right, maybe he never will be.

He makes it to lunch without further pestering, ducking under the stairwell by the music room for refuge in case they decide to team up on him. Nibbling on a tater tot, he wonders why they're all so hell-bent on him playing. It's not like he hasn't told them, albeit in vague terms, that he's pretty much done with music.

A sudden flurry of footsteps on the hall above him turns into a beat of silence before Maka lands in front of him, breathing hard, eyes wide.

"Maka? What are-mphfmph." His next words are cut off by a hand over his mouth and Maka full body slamming him against the wall beneath the stairs. He can feel the calluses on her fingers as they graze his lips and see the warning in her eyes while she holds up a finger in the universal gesture for _be quiet._

Not a second later, he hears Blake's unmistakeable voice. "Maka, where'd you go? C'mon, you can't give up like this! I'll never live it down if the only girl I've ever lost a judo match to just quits music!" They watch his back as he runs right by their hiding spot and skids around the opposite corner. She doesn't release him until there are a solid fifteen seconds of silence and then does so quickly, taking a deep breath and adjusting the violin case strapped to her back with jittery fingers.

"What was Blake talking about?" Soul asks while he rubs his face, so warm where her hand had just been.

Maka's smile seems a touch too strained when she answers. "Oh, well. I told him I'm not going to participate in the competition after all."

"What? You weren't able to find anyone to accompany you?" It doesn't make sense - Maka is one of the best violinists in town; there's no way she'd have trouble finding a partner.

"No, it's not that. It's just-" She looks at the ground for a moment before dragging her gaze to meet his eyes. "If it wasn't with you, I didn't want to play at all. But I completely respect your desire not to play," she adds hastily, stepping closer to him. "I just don't think anyone else understands music the way you do, and Wes always said to try to play with different sounds to get better."

"Oh." He wishes he had something more eloquent to say than that, but seeing her there, eyes overbright and hands flitting into and out of fists as if she needs something to hold on to, leaves his mind blank.

"Anyway, thanks for not giving away my hiding spot - you know how persistent he is once he gets fired up. I'll see you around." She turns to leave with a final adjustment to her violin case, but the motion dislodges a small piece of paper that flutters to the floor behind her.

Soul stoops to pick it up and opens his mouth to call her back when he notices a familiar long, flowing cursive peeking out of one corner of the folded page. He doesn't even stop to think that the note might be private or that he's snooping - even _he_ doesn't have any remnants left of Wes's script except a cheesy birthday card and some doodles in their old music folder.

He scans the page quickly, greedy for anything his brother said, and lowers it after another moment. This was a note they'd all passed around during practices with Father when they were supposed to be looking at the sheet music, full of violin puns from Wes and witty rejoinders from Maka while Soul just scribbled grumpy faces next to anything his brother wrote.

It's also the note in which he promised to play with Maka again.

" _Maybe if_ someone _didn't get disqualified, we could have destroyed the competition. Ox and Kim wouldn't know tempo if it slapped them in the face."_

" _Whatever Maka. It's enough to know we woulda beat them, right?"_

" _Of course it's not! Everyone will remember what actually happened, not what could have been."_

" _Maka's right, little bro. The newspapers only care about that score once the judging is over."_

" _Okay, fine, geez. I promise I'll play the next one with you, alright?"_

" _Excellent! I can't wait to show them I'm better than Mama ever was!"_

The hand holding the note shakes slightly. It was the last time they all practiced together before Maka left and Wes went on to play in his final show.

What would Wes think of him now? Turning down his oldest, used-to-be-closest friend who's done nothing but try to make amends?

Soul glances down at the note and then to Maka's retreating frame, his heartbeat wild and his stomach roiling as he comes to a decision. He doesn't want to be haunted by any more unfulfilled promises.

"Wait, Maka!"

She turns around at the other end of the hall and tilts her head.

Jogging over to her, he asks, "When's the competition?"

"In thirty minutes, why?"

Soul blanches. "Thirty minutes? Jesus Maka, we've got to go _now_ if we're gonna make it on time!"

"We?" Her eyes shine momentarily before she shakes her head and steels her jaw. "No, this is ridiculous, I'd feel horrible if you played with me because you felt sorry for me or something. I don't want you to do something you'll regret later."

Groaning, Soul grabs her hand and starts tugging her down the hall. "We don't have time for this. Listen, I wouldn't be offering if I really didn't wanna do this. Trust me, okay?"

"But you don't know the music-" she starts, pulling out of his grip to better sling her violin over her back.

He smiles crookedly at her. "I can still sight read until it won't matter anyway. What piece did you pick?"

"Saint-Saëns' _Rondo Capriccioso_."

He tries not to let his smile sour too much. "That was one of Wes's favorites. I'll do my best to sight read, but it'll probably be rough."

"Rough is better than nothing. Let's go!"

They rush down the hallway just in time to nearly careen into Blake, who bursts out of a math classroom with his hands still cupped to his mouth. He hardly gets a chance to push up his shutter shades before Soul and Maka run by yelling a quick, "We're competing!"

Soul thinks he hears Blake shout back, "We'll see you there!" but is too busy trying to simultaneously come up with an excuse for cutting class and think of the fastest route to the music hall.

They reach the parking lot in another minute and Soul shoves a spare helmet at Maka while slamming his own over his head. Over the initial rev of his motorcycle, he catches a faint, "Thank you. This takes a lot of courage."

Courage, huh? Soul peeks back at her as she settles in behind him and locks her arms around his waist, cheeks red from running and those green eyes sparkling as they reflect the midday sun. No, courage is when Maka stepped up on stage an hour after her mother walked in on her father's empty bottles and lipstick-stained cheeks, and left her daughter wide-eyed on Soul's doorstep so many years ago.

Who knows, though. Maybe some of Maka's courage will rub off on him.


	4. Our endless, numbered days

They arrive at the venue a scant five minutes before the welcome ceremony. Soul throws down the kickstand on his bike and chucks their helmets under the seat, not bothering to make sure he's actually in a legal parking spot. He tries not to dwell on how nice it was to have someone else riding with him, warm and alive as she laughed at a flock of startled pigeons when they barreled past and yelled at him to slow down when he gunned it across the train tracks.

Breathing heavily, they're about to enter the building when they're nearly clotheslined by Blake and Liz speeding by. Liz appears to be strangling Blake's hand in what for anyone else would be an extraordinarily painful grip as he tows her along on roller blades.

"Blake Jedediah Strickland, _you stop us right now!_ " she shrieks, clutching a patched up duffel bag to her chest.

"Calm down, calm down. Told you we'd make it!" Blake says, backwards swizzling past her and snatching the bag from her trembling grip. "Thought you might want this," he says as he tosses the bag to Soul.

Soul catches it awkwardly and unzips a corner. His breath catches; it's a perfect copy of his old competition suit, down to the pinstriped jacket and wine-red undershirt. Liz and Blake even threw in dress shoes and a handkerchief - Wes had always said a gentleman never left the house without one.

"Guys…" Words fail him. They were prepared for this, all this time?

"You're welcome, America," Blake says with a wink. "We were hoping you'd play again, since that was the last time we saw you happy, and believe it or not we really _do_ care." He slaps Soul on the back. "Now get in there and show them what you've got!"

Maka glances at her phone. "We're going to be late-!"

Liz shoves Soul towards the door. "Go on, we'll find our seats fine on our own. Break a leg or whatever."

Soul nods at the two of them and enters the building a step behind Maka.

Luckily, their tardiness goes unpunished as they grab their entry ticket from a sour looking man behind the stage. According to that little nub of paper, they're number 11 in the line of performers and get a little extra time to prepare.

Or, in Soul's case, regret every decision he's ever made.

Maka places her violin next to him while she goes to change. He remembers how tenderly she'd regarded it the last time they played together, and wonders if she'd been thinking of Wes when her expression turned so soft, so unguarded. Hesitantly, he reaches out to touch the neck; what's so special about it..?

"Soul?"

He retracts his hand like he's been burned, tripping over his tongue in an effort to explain he was just dusting it off.

The words die on his lips when he sees her.

A sleeveless dress as black as the water in his dreams hugs her chest down to her waist before flaring into ruffles, and Soul resists the urge to tell her to turn around so he can make sure it's zipped all the way because she's not eleven with tiny arms anymore. Her hair is in pigtails again, too, another throwback to the days she'd huff about being distracted by hair getting caught in her bow, and he doesn't know what to do about the dull ache in his chest from seeing her dressed for performing once more.

Soul realizes he's gaping just as Maka gestures to the changing rooms. "Your turn. And when you get back, you better tell me what's on my face that's making you stare like that."

He practically dives into the small room, cheeks aflame and heart still pounding as he tries in vain to get himself under control. There are better things to worry about, like envisioning the song he's about to play for a roomful of people and changing into his performance clothing.

Getting into his suit is not as hard as he remembers, until he gets to the tie. Wes had always done it for him, despite their father's complaints that he'd need to 'man up eventually.' He struggles with it for a few minutes when there's a knock on the door.

"Hurry up in there; we're going on soon!" It's Maka, sounding stressed and excited all at once.

Deciding that a keyed up Maka is better than an angry one, Soul admits defeat and leaves the room, tie in hand. She glances from his tie to his face and quirks an eyebrow. "Need some help?"

"Don't say it," he mutters, willing his blush (since when does he _blush?_ ) to go away. She grabs the piece of fabric and deftly loops it around his neck. Soul prides himself on keeping the shudder from her touch to a small twitch. "Where'd you learn to tie a tie, anyway?"

"I used to tie Wes's all the time before we'd play. He'd say something about how my tiny hands could make tighter knots or something." That warmth is back in her voice again, and it's all Soul can do to not simply crumple where he stands. He has no reason to be jealous, though, especially since he never had a chance anyway.

"Right," is all he says.

Thoughts of Maka and Wes together ruin the high of their rush to make it here on time, and Soul is once again left feeling hollow. He barely notices Maka's hands on his chest anymore, and when he blinks again she's taking a sip of water from a small paper cup. It's so tiring to keep his thoughts in the present in the face of such sour memories, and he slumps down against the wall until he's sitting on the floor with his legs bent awkwardly in front of him.

Faint noise from the auditorium floats in, and someone's screechy sharp note reminds Soul of Nightmare Wes. Soul grips his knees with his hands, breathing deliberately, but air seems to be leaving the room or maybe just avoiding his lungs, because suddenly it's so hard to breathe. What if he's not good enough, what if he makes Maka regret choosing him to be her accompanist? He fights back the bile roiling in his gut; there's no way he could handle seeing her eyes dim in disappointment again.

"Hey. You okay?" Maka asks in that infuriatingly empathetic way, like she also feels the walls falling in and the air getting thin but can somehow actually _deal_ with it.

He hangs his head, ashamed. If only he were stronger, if only he could still hear the music.

If only he weren't broken.

"Look at me."

Slowly, he raises his head. Her eyes are piercing, green and steady, and he tries not to immediately look away at the sheer _command_ in her gaze.

"You used to spend so much time poring over the notes on your sheet music, practicing the same chord progressions over and over and over again until you could play it with your eyes closed. I was there." She pauses then, and her expression hardens slightly. "Do you trust me?"

"Yes." He's surprised how quickly he says it, but it's more than a little mesmerizing to have her face so close and her eyes staring so intently into him.

"Then trust me when I say _you can do this._ I know your music, I know your sound, and you're exactly what I want for this piece." She reaches under his chin and tilts his head up further, his neck now straining, and he's never felt both so safe and so vulnerable before. "Besides, you're not alone in this. Right, partner?"

His eyes widen. But before he can reply coherently, the monitor pokes his head around the corner and says, "Number 11, you're up next."

Maka grabs Soul's hand and pulls him up. "Let's show them what we're made of." The words are scarcely out of her mouth before she's tugging him along faster and faster until they're practically running, and between gulping breaths Soul realizes that this is where he belongs: next to her, letting the heat from her hands bleed into his veins and anchor him to the present moment that he's tried so hard to escape.

Yes he's terrified of falling apart in front of so many people, yes he's worried that he won't do Maka justice because his music has disowned him, but as she squeezes his hand and pulls him forward, the tether of her fingers around his a physical manifestation of the bond he's felt since he saw her discard that last post-it, he thinks that maybe it's okay to try anyway no matter how fear gnaws at his belly and dread slides down his spine.

Maybe it's okay to begin again.

Maka walks to the center of the stage, violin in hand, while Soul shuffles to the piano. The lights are hot against his skin and blinding in his eyes when he glances towards the audience to look for Blake and Liz, though it's probably better that he doesn't notice how many other people are watching.

With a final, confident smile, Maka begins to play. It's stately, regal, and completely unlike what Soul had heard the other night in the music room. All he can think of is that it's...normal. Just what anyone who knew anything about classical music would expect to hear.

It's not Maka.

Soul accompanies her gently, notes soft and smooth in his ears, as befits his role. He's just beginning to feel comfortable in his playing when Maka suddenly ups the tempo, throwing a challenging glance at him over her shoulder. A fresh wave of adrenaline courses through him - _there_ she is. He picks up the pace to keep up with her, fingers spread wide as they skitter across the keys.

 _Playing with someone is a lot like dancing with them, Soul._ Wes' words cut through his mind with jagged edges and tear his newfound equilibrium apart. Unbidden, memories of the first time he saw Wes and Maka play together flood his thoughts, and the agony of witnessing the tenderness that had drenched their shared smile at the song's end flares anew in his gut.

 _If you go too fast, it's like you're stepping on their toes._ Soul quickly flings his hands to the lower register to keep up with Maka's unflagging tempo, her notes splashes of goldenrod that fill the auditorium. He _can't_ be the reason she loses this, he can't fuck up _again_ -!

The next few measures are full of Maka's creative take on the song, playing with the time signature and deliberately twisting full rests into half rests for flair. Soul does his best to keep up with her, desperately trying to settle into a rhythm that's alien and familiar at the same time. All those nights he'd stay up late with her while she practiced come to mind, and the way she'd make small, frustrated noises that 'she wasn't as good as Wes' crackle in the background of his thoughts in a distracting counterpoint to the smooth sounds of her violin.

 _And most importantly, Soul: end with a bang._

Soul looks out at the audience again, this time towards the perimeter where the lights don't blind him. Something catches his eye; maybe light glinting off of someone's hair, or a trick of the shadows draping the corners of the room. Or maybe he's just finally gone crazy, because there, grinning at him on the stairwell on the left side of the auditorium, is Wes, complete with his bow-punctured throat and tattered, bloody suit. Raising an arm, he points one bony, accusatory finger at Soul, and then every note Soul plays becomes fainter and fainter like all the strings have rotted and decayed, and every key becomes swaddled in hollow silence.

Not here, not _now!_ He desperately tries to stay in sync with Maka's playing, visually mapping out his chords in advance of the notes she plays so joyfully, so unaware of his struggle. His throat tightens when he thinks of how happy she is right now, of how it's going to be _his_ fault when that changes, and it hits him that he'll never be good enough to play with her because the only Evans worthy of her music is long gone.

Harder and harder he slams the keys, trying to squeeze out every ounce of noise in the hopes he'll be able to hear his music again. A quick glance towards the audience shows that Wes is gone, but that only seems to make the hole in his chest grow larger. Swallowing roughly, he looks at Maka, pigtails bobbing to the beat of her bowing arm, lost in the rhythm of her sound. If only he could join her-!

Crushing the pedal and skipping across the keys, he reaches, reaches, _reaches_ for her music, reaches for something to hold onto while he wades through this soundless mire. He's trapped, cut off, removed from the only way he knows how to express himself as he bangs out what he thinks is an appropriate accompaniment to the languid tempo she is currently setting. Maka flicks her head towards him again as she changes it back to something more traditional, and Soul can hear the color leeching out of her sound as she does.

She's losing her color because of _him_.

He slows, weighted down by the realization that this is all he'll ever amount to - a half-baked friend and a broken pianist. His hands slide off the keys in defeat. It's over.

Maka plays a few more notes before she realizes he's stopped, and, to Soul's great surprise, deliberately removes her bow from the strings. The ensuing silence screams.

Soul gapes; she could have kept going and gotten a decent score! The only reason he stopped was so the judges wouldn't take off additional points for his terrible playing; why is she ruining her chance to win? The crowd murmurs and shifts in their seats, and he can feel their disappointment rolling onstage in waves.

"Again."

Eyes wide, Soul stares at her. "What do you mean, 'again?'" he whispers. "We're done, disqualified, I made us _lose_ -"

She cuts him off with her raised bow hand. "Winning was never the point. Again."

She begins the song from the beginning, and Soul sits there, frozen. How can she expect him to do this without hearing his music..?

 _You have me._

Energy surges through him when he remembers the sincerity in her eyes as she spoke those words and the warmth of her hand as she held his. It's true; he's _not_ alone, not right now, and for just this moment he'll pretend to believe he's the one she truly wants to play alongside.

He presses the keys with renewed vigor, still deaf to their tone but determined to try regardless. Listening to the bright pastels swirling from her violin, he tries to match them with some lighthearted notes, unsure if he's hitting the right tone but forging ahead anyway, spurred on by her shimmering sound.

Sweat streaming down his face, he looks at her again, gauging how hard he taps the keys by the set of her shoulders and the ferocity of her music. She's absolutely _glowing_ , grinning at him over her shoulder while she fills the auditorium with her sound. With _their_ sound.

Eyes locked, they barrel at full speed towards the end of the song while Soul pours every ounce of himself into these final notes, and it feels like his heart might burst from the unbridled joy splashed across her face. He hopes at least she can hear him, that he can at least reach _her_ with this paltry offering of mismatched notes. If music has left him, so be it.

He has her.

They end together on a high note, the richness of its timbre echoing throughout the auditorium. There's just a beat of silence, a collective intake of breath, and then people begin to stand and cheer. Soul thinks he can hear Blake's voice mixed in with the more demure clapping, but he's not really paying them any mind.

His entire being is focused on Maka and how she's backlit by the stage lights, their glow haloing her body like a celestial gown. She's shining, sparkling, _radiant_ in her triumph, and as Soul feels an answering smile bloom on his face, he knows for certain that he wants to play with her again. That feeling of oneness, that split-second merging of sounds had made him feel alive in ways he hasn't since he was a child playing _Chopsticks_ with Wes in their sun-drenched practice hall.

As the force of his smile begins to make his cheeks ache, he steps out of the piano bench to stand with her at the front of the stage. Swaying on her heels, face split by an incandescent grin, Maka reaches for his hand.

And then, suddenly, awfully, the world stops spinning.

As if in slow motion, her body goes limp and falls away from him. Those beautiful eyes, overflowing with life just a moment ago, go dark when they roll back in her head. Static buzzes in Soul's ears as he stares down at her unconscious form, the color fading from her cheeks while startled yells and a flurry of movement from the audience cascade around him.

She lands on top of her bow. Soul bites back a scream when he realizes it looks like it's jutting from her neck.

The door handle is dull and sticky, the fingerprints of innumerable strangers marring its stainless steel. Soul wonders how many of them left smiling after visiting loved ones, and how many left in tears. Every time he raises his hand to open the door, flashbacks to the way Maka fell like a marionette with cut strings sears his thoughts and he jerks back, unable ( _unwilling_ , says that sneering inner voice) to see her like that again.

Lifeless. Pale. _Silent._

A nurse brushes past and saves him the decision, opening the door and walking over to Maka's bedside to check on her IV.

After a perfunctory examination to make sure her patient's numbers look good, the nurse leaves and he's faced with a mildly exasperated Maka, who is huffing as she strains to reach her backpack on the floor near the foot of the bed. She looks so small beneath the linen sheets.

"Hey, would you pass me my bag?" she asks, heaving a frustrated sigh. "The nurse was gone so fast I couldn't even ask."

Wordlessly, he bends to grab her bag and passes it to her. Their hands touch, surging, electric, eternal, and Soul shudders at that sense of _belonging_ that apparently now comes with any physical interactions with her. But there's no time to think about that; Maka could be seriously injured or sick, and his first duty is to make sure she's okay. It's hard for him to get the words out, though - his mind is still processing events like he's underwater, sounds distorted and people moving in slow motion.

"So…" Her comment is drawn out, hesitant. "I'm sorry for scaring you. That's never happened to me before; I guess I must not have had enough to eat or something." When Soul remains silent, Maka continues. "But thanks for coming to visit today - I was worried I'd be stuck alone with Papa instead."

This earns her a snort from Soul, who is hovering near her bedside, uncertain. "Can't have that," he says after a little while, brushing his bangs out of his face.

With a huff, Maka digs through her bag and smiles predatorily when she finds a textbook.

" _Ow!_ What the hell Maka, what was that-"

"You're just standing there like it's the end of the world or something! Lighten up; I'm not dead," she says, indignant. "How about a little conversation or something, Mr. Mopey."

He remembers how she looked on the stage floor, bow curving from her neck like a downed mast, and shudders. "I just...you didn't look good, Maka."

"Yes, well, how do I look now?"

That familiar fire burns hot and unyielding in her eyes, pink lips curved down in a small frown. He wants to run his thumb along them, or maybe just press his hand to her cheek to feel the warmth that means she's not just a figment of his imagination.

"Fine, I guess," he concedes, trying not to let himself stare for too long.

"Then cut the act and talk to me," she grumbles, shifting around on the bed. "I'm not going to be here forever, you know. What did I miss in class today?"

Soul feels the tension that had metastasized to his neck, shoulders, and stomach begin to relax. She's as energetic as always, and that textbook to the head hurt enough that she doesn't seem to be missing any strength.

Except. His face clouds as he remembers exactly how he had sabotaged her performance, how he'd given up and cost her a chance at the competition she had wanted to play in so badly.

Pursing her lips, Maka frowns at him. "What's with that look? English couldn't have been _that_ bad."

Haunted, he looks anywhere but her face. "You lost because of me. I ruined your chance to win."

"Is that what you think? Tell me, how did you feel at the end of our second try?"

Memories of thundering applause, the heat of the lights, and the exhilaration of melding his music to hers flood his mind. He can't find the words, but something must have softened on his face because she nods and says, "When your sound sparks something inside them that makes the audience stand and clap, you can't forget what that feels like."

She's right, he realizes with the kind of clarity that rolls through him in slow waves. Her words - no, his own choices, brought about by what she's reminded him of - have led him here. Maybe music isn't the enemy after all.

This epiphany roots him where he stands while Maka opens her book and flips to a page near the back, a knowing smile on her lips. "See? Nothing to fear."

"But," he sputters, "I still can't hear my music! Even if I did kinda wanna play, that's almost worse, to want something I can't have."

"Then you're going to have to fight for it." Maka has a hard gleam in her eyes now. "Nothing worth having ever comes easily."

She continues reading while Soul digests this and sinks down onto the end of her bed. He wants to argue with her, to tell her that she sounds like an old lady with that kinda stuff, when it hits him that she's not pitying him. She's not treating him any differently than she always has, despite what he used to think. If anything, her willingness to push him means she thinks he's strong enough to take it, and that thought comforts him. It's been a long time since anyone has thought he was strong.

He thinks about the brightness and ferocity of her sound. Music hasn't moved him like this in so long that he worries it's all an illusion, something that will disappear when Maka inevitably moves on with her life and finds someone more like Wes. Glancing at her while she turns a page with a jerky flick of the wrist, he wonders what his music feels like to her.

The contemplative quiet lasts until Spirit walks in.

"Maka honey, I brought you a strawberry milkshake-" He freezes in the doorway when he sees Soul, hand tightening on the cardboard cup. "Oh, it's you," he sighs, heavy bags under his eyes. "I thought Maka wasn't allowed to have visitors."

"I am, and I wanted him here," Maka says, glaring at her father. "I thought I asked to be left alone until morning."

"I just thought you might be lonely," he mumbles. "Since they just finished the MRI."

"MRI?" Soul asks, frowning.

"Don't worry about it," Maka says, waving a hand airily. "They're being thorough. Papa just has a flair for the dramatic."

Glancing between the two of them, Spirit seems to visibly pull himself together. "I do tend to be a teensy bit overprotective when it comes to my baby girl," he says, smile as tepid as old coffee. "I just want you to be happy, sweetie."

"Yes, well." Maka takes a deep breath and manages something close to a genuine smile. "I am happy, Papa. No need to worry."

Something about the way her voice wilted when she said _worry_ strikes Soul, but he can't pinpoint how. The moment is lost when Spirit looks at Maka again and says, "I'll leave you two alone, then. Call me when he leaves, okay?"

"Okay, Papa."

One more watered-down smile and Spirit trudges back outside to the waiting room.

"He worries too much," Maka huffs, crossing her arms. "One fall and it's like the world is ending."

Soul takes in the swoop of her neck, the tint in her cheeks, the shine in her hair. "Well, you are the world to him, right?" The words fall out of his mouth and he regrets them immediately as his face heats and he tries to arrange his expression into something more neutral.

"I guess you're right," she says quietly.

Soul doesn't know what to do in the silence that follows, wondering what could wipe away that sadness coating her smile like gasoline.

"So, uh," he starts, grasping for something to talk about. "Guess your dad got over his 'protect Maka from all men' phase, huh? He used to threaten me if I was in the same building as you were, let alone the same room."

That only seems to add a layer of bitterness to her expression. "Yes, well, you remember when Mama left. He tried every trick in the book to get her to come back until she finally got a restraining order against him. I guess you could say he hasn't been the same since."

Soul winces. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Maka snorts. "He did it to himself. But," she pauses, lips thinning. "He _has_ been better lately. I haven't seen him with another woman since we moved back."

Soul nods, well aware of Spirit's prior infidelities. Soul had let Maka spend the night in one of the spare rooms many times when she didn't want to interrupt her father and his _guests._

"Enough about him," Maka says with a wave of her hand as her phone buzzes and she smiles. "I have good news." She holds it out to him with an email titled 'Congratulations Viewers' Choice Winners!' on the screen.

"You mean we won something?" Soul asks, incredulous. No way they could have won the actual competition with his errors.

"Yep! We might not have won the whole competition, but there was a viewer's choice category, too. The audience had to vote on their favorite performance, and we were it."

A slow smile creeps across his face. "Huh. Even though I lost it in the beginning?"

The corners of Maka's eyes crinkle as she laughs, a full, satisfying sound. "Even so. You more than made up for it when you started again. Also," she stops to look at his face carefully. "Have you thought about what you're doing after high school?"

"Uh? No?" He barely thinks about the next few hours, let alone months.

"Well, I think you should consider applying to Shibusen with me. They're a great music school, and if we do well in another competition, we'll be shoo-ins."

"I don't know about that," he says ruefully. "There's no point in me trying to go to school for music when I can't hear my own. But I think I get what you were talking about, with how it makes you feel. There was something-" Pausing, he runs a frustrated hand through his hair. "I can't really explain it, but, yeah."

Her grin nearly splits her face in two.

"But that doesn't mean I'm going to Shibusen," he continues defensively, practically hearing the gears turning in her head. "I just...music's not so bad when I can hear it, all right?"

"Okay," she says, clearly fighting to keep her expression as neutral as possible and failing spectacularly. Her eyes never lie, and they're positively sparkling now.

The nurse returns and tells Soul visiting hours are over. Glancing out the window, he's surprised to see it's dark out. Time passes so seamlessly when he's with her.

"Thanks again for coming to visit me," she calls out as he heads to the door. "I'll see you in school tomorrow!"

Soul raises his hand in acknowledgement and is about to leave when Maka says, "And don't forget you can text me! It's not just for study help, you know."

That warmth is back in the middle of his chest, and this time Soul lets it lift the corners of his mouth. "Sure, okay."

The air is crisp and cool when he walks out of the hospital, enough that he tugs his jacket tighter around him, and when he glances at the sky the stars have never seemed so bright.

/

He's been here before.

Swatting away branches and stepping over crimson rivulets, Soul can't shake the sinking feeling that he's done this in another time or another place. A twig cracks nearby and birds take wing in surprise. Deep-seated dread, also familiar, rises like the sun in his chest.

So he runs.

Leaves fall like daggers from skeletal trees, slicing small, angry lines in his skin while he vaults over rotting logs and slips on decaying undergrowth. He's bleeding freely by the time he breaks through the forest into an open meadow, unperturbed that his blood is black while the stars glimmer bright and lifeless above. He hears the sound of a violin, playful pinks and yellows, and jogs in its direction. At first it reminds him of ash-blonde hair and warm hands, but the more he listens, the more he imagines handkerchiefs and belly laughs.

The meadow curves in a gentle descent to the ocean, and it's here that Soul finds the source of the music. Or rather, the _sources._

Maka and Wes are playing together, standing on opposite sides of a picnic blanket while the waves crash rhythmically against the shore. They don't seem to notice Soul's approach while their bows dip and weave, too caught up in the oneness of their sound for him.

Slick, hot jealousy pumps through Soul's veins before apathy douses it, because really, this isn't surprising anymore. Jealousy takes far too much energy for someone without a chance.

Still, he can't help but be envious of the way their sounds meld and merge so seamlessly, and of how close they seem standing there, looking into each other's eyes as they play the anthem of their own little universe.

Their duet is interrupted by a low rumbling in the ground that grows in intensity, small fissures appearing in the sand beneath their feet. They don't seem to notice, though, and continue to play as though the world weren't disintegrating around them.

That changes when the ground disappears.

It's like someone abruptly slammed away every bit of the world but the spit of land beneath their feet, and all that's left is darkness in every direction. Wes and Maka, startled, look at Soul the same moment one final tremor ripples through the air.

Soul understands what's happening too late. He's three paces away from both of them, and they're already tipping back into that black abyss, arms windmilling in slow motion.

He only has time to save one.

Diving forward, he reaches out a hand to both of them, hoping that maybe if he reaches far enough, he won't have to choose. His fingertips brush Maka's, but because he tried to make it to a halfway point, he's not close enough to grab her. Her eyes flash despairingly as she falls into darkness.

He doesn't even manage to touch Wes, feeling instead the faint breath of wind from his hand missing Soul's. "Why?" Wes asks simply as he falls, surprise rippling into betrayal before he's swallowed up by the velvet silence.

Horrified, Soul peers over the sandy edge of the ground, desperately trying to see if either of them are there.

Heavy stillness greets him. One, two, three heartbeats without Maka and Wes, and Soul's breathing hitches. He curls in on himself, the finality of his choice almost choking him, as a faint voice cackles from somewhere in the darkness.

 _You can't have them both._

Gasping, Soul wakes with his shoulders on the floor and his feet still tangled in the comforter. Pulse racing, he grabs his phone and checks the time - two AM. He's only been asleep for an hour. Groaning, he heaves himself into bed and stares at the ceiling. It's so hard to fall back asleep after a nightmare, and there's too much time between now and when he has to get up for school for him to brood.

His phone is still in his hand, expectant. Maybe…

No, there's no way she'd still be awake. Unless she also couldn't sleep, being stuck in the hospital? He mulls it over for a few minutes until he decides to finally text her. After all, she'd said it was fine for him to text him about non-school things, so this is what she was expecting anyway. Probably.

Despite having made the decision, his thumb hovers hesitantly over the touchscreen. Mentally cursing, he taps out a quick [[hey, it's soul]] before chucking the phone on top of yesterday's clothes and diving under the covers like the grown-ass man he is.

His breathing finally evens out after both the nightmare and texting Maka when a faint buzz catches his attention. Peeking over the side of his mattress, he catches his phone's home screen informing him of a response from Maka, and he nearly dives back under the covers before he realizes how uncool he must look and grabs his phone out of self-spite. Her response brings a small smile to his lips.

[[What are you doing awake at this hour?]]

[[same could be said for you, mom]]

[[Aren't you hilarious. I was just reading and lost track of time. I highly doubt that's what you were up to.]]

[[nah. just couldn't sleep]

[[Oh. Nightmare?]]

[[what, are you a mind reader now?]]

[[No, just a you reader. Wanna talk about it?]]

Guilt and failure still cling to him like a second skin, and the thought of reliving her final look or Wes's final words makes him shudder.

[[not really]]

[[Hm. Are you getting tired again yet?]]

[[no. probably just won't sleep tonight]]

[[Well that's ridiculous. Here, listen]]

She sends an audio file in her next message. Soul taps it, unsure of what to expect, when the rich sound of a violin comes through his speakers. The song is dark and hopeful all at once, mournful notes drawn out just long enough to make his heart clench in sympathy before being swept into a building crescendo. There's something comforting about it though, something that seems to whisper _you're okay_ as he lets the music cover him like a blanket. His eyelids are heavy when the last tremulous note wavers in the air, and as he falls asleep, he hears his song for her gently begin in the back of his head.

Nothing wakes him for the rest of the night.


	5. Love is not a victory march

The next morning, he awakens to a single text from Maka.

[[Sleep well.]]

It's impossible for him to drag his eyes away from their conversation. She told him to sleep well; that means she cares about him on some level, right? Or is that just being polite? He hovers for a moment over the keyboard to reply, but instead goes to save the song to his phone. He'll tell her in person how much it meant to him.

That is, if he can get through Blake's headlock once he gets to school.

"Broseidon, check it out. They're doing something different this year for Shibusen entrance exams. Somethin' about how it's gonna be extra hard to get in." He gestures to a notice on the bulletin board, posted on bright yellow paper.

Detaching himself from Blake, Soul wanders over. Someone shoulder checks him, and he's about to turn on his patented scowl when he looks down and sees Maka.

"Morning, Drowsy," she says good naturedly, craning her neck to look at the notice. "I guess my music sent you straight to sleep, huh?"

"Yeah, thanks for that. It was-" He grapples for the right word, but only succeeds in getting distracted by flecks of gold in her eyes before reminding himself firmly that he's no Wes. Soul wishes he could find better words to express how grateful he is without making himself look like a total loser, but he guesses his message gets through just fine by her small smile.

"Glad you liked it," she says before straightening up and scanning the paper. Her face hardens when she gets to the bottom, and Soul peers over her shoulder to see what the fuss is about.

"Due to an influx of enrollment last year, Shibusen Academy is capping its enrollment to two students per high school," the notice reads, with additional information in the fine print elaborating on the need to have won a music competition within the last academic year to qualify.

Maka purses her lips. "Are you ready for a battle?" There's a grim determination in her eyes that puts Soul on edge.

"Battle?" he asks, uncertain.

"Oh, it's going to be an all out brawl." She glances to her right, at a group of students chattering around Kim Diehl and Jacqueline Dupre. Kim looks up at just the right moment and smirks, tossing her head back and putting a hand on her hip.

"Cocky," Maka mutters, fist clenched at her side. "Come with me. We have to plan." She grabs his hand and pulls him off towards the music room, Blake winking suggestively in farewell.

Luckily for them, the room is empty since the music teacher is busy with office hours during this period. "Okay, what do you mean plan?" Soul says when he gets his hand back.

"I mean that this is _war!_ " she cries, crossing her arms. "Didn't you see the way Jackie and Kim were sneering at us? They think _they'll_ be the ones to get into Shibusen." Staring darkly at the whiteboard, she whispers, "Over my dead body."

"Woah, calm down. Why do you think they're so set on Shibusen?"

Rounding on him, Maka reaches into her bag and slaps a newspaper down on the nearest desk. "This is why," she hisses.

Soul looks at the article in question. The headline reads, "Death City's New Diehl - Violin Prodigy Sweeps Local Competition."

Incredulous, Soul says, "Are you seriously threatened by Kim and Jackie?"

"They're talented," Maka counters. "They could get in as easily as we could, if we slip up."

Soul hears an unspoken _if_ you _slip up_ and cringes, beginning to feel the stakes of what Maka's suggesting. Of what he's considering.

"So what do we need to do? It said something about winning a competition..?"

Maka turns her scowl to him. "Yes, it did. We won the viewer's choice in our last performance, so that's not the problem. The real issue is how much time they've had to play together and how coordinated they are. We'll have to check them out when we can so we can out-play them during the team enrollment exams. I think they're playing in the annual talent show in a couple months, so we'll just have to keep doing our best until we get a better read on their style."

Soul sighs. Of course there would be another competition, _of course_ he'd have to figure out a better way to work around his musical hearing loss.

"Are you worried?"

He looks up to find Maka watching him with a steady gaze, waiting.

"Yeah." He answers honestly, the song she sent him playing in the back of his mind like it belongs there and making him feel like it's okay to let her in, just a little.

"Fear is normal before you take a big step," she says, moving closer. "But it doesn't have to define you." She takes his hand in hers, uncurls the fist he hadn't realized he'd made with it, and gently begins to knead the knots coiled behind his knuckles. "You haven't been stretching your hands, have you?"

Before Maka had returned, it had been a long time since he let anyone close enough to do more than awkwardly hover in that in-between space of 'are we gonna hug goodbye or nah?' before sending them off with a weak wave. But her fingers fill the spaces between his so well, so warmly, that he finds himself relaxing into her touch. "No, not really. Before last week, I didn't play enough for it to make sense."

She frowns at his hands. "I don't want you to do this if it's not something you want," she says quietly, her fingertips slowing on his knuckles. "It's your choice to make."

She starts to release his hand, but he catches it before she can, not ready to give up the contact just yet. Her pulse is strong and steady against his thumb.

"I want to play with you again," he says slowly. "And I want to find that-whatever it was in the music last time, so count me in. For Shibusen."

"I believe you'll find it. After all," and she pauses, a proud smile curving her lips, "we didn't win viewer's choice for nothing. Our sound is powerful."

She's right. Maka launches immediately into song options and the tone of the music they want for their piece, but Soul is only half-listening, looking at his hands and -

They're stronger together.

/

This isn't going to be as easy as he'd hoped.

"C'mon, Maka, we don't need to practice every damn minute of the day," Soul growls into his phone as he flops onto the bed, the old box spring creaking wearily. "Can't you leave me alone for a little?"

"No," comes her sharp reply, muffled around the edges by his phone's speakers. "We have a lot of work to do if we're going to be in sync enough to take top marks at the enrollment exam. I'll see you in an hour."

He rolls over and half-heartedly punches the pillow, angry that he hasn't been able to progress. For all his initial gusto at the thought of improving himself, he still loses the music about two minutes into a song. Nevermind that he's tried meditating, exercising, drinking tea, and just about _everything else_ before playing to get his mind in a better place. But so far, nothing's worked.

With a final, heavy sigh, Soul sits up and drags himself to the kitchen to see about fixing up some snacks for Maka's practice session. The empty pantries and fridge mock him, though, and he mentally curses himself for not going shopping last week when he cooked his last batch of Bagel Bites. His daily failure at music, made more painful by the fact that he now desperately wants it back, has settled into his limbs like lead weights. Getting dressed, making food, _grocery shopping_ \- all seem too hard to do right now. He barely has enough energy to see Maka, though her presence is usually motivating enough on its own.

His stomach rumbles. Time seems suspended while he stands in the middle of the empty kitchen, trying to decide if he cares enough to get food for himself. The answer is no, but adding Maka to the equation is just enough to get him walking towards the garage and his motorcycle. He hopes she still likes shortcake.

At the store, Soul stares at his basket of strawberries, shortbread, and whipped cream before squinting back at the different kinds of mint (does chocolate mint _really_ taste like chocolate?) lining the cooler. With a sigh, he grabs one at random and is about to head towards the checkout when he hears a familiar voice behind him. Straightening up, he looks over his shoulder towards the fruit display about ten feet back. There, it appears that Spirit is arguing with an employee about their berry stock.

"Are you sure you're out of strawberries? My daughter loves them, you see, and it'd really mean a lot to her right now if-"

"Listen guy, I don't need to hear your sob story. We're out of strawberries - that's it. There's nothing I can do for ya. Have a nice day."

The store worker stomps off, but Spirit doesn't move. He just stares at the empty display case, not blinking, like he's lost his chance at saving something precious. There's something about the fragile set of his shoulders, as if a single touch will shatter him, that makes Soul clear his throat and wave.

Spirit looks up from the case and makes eye contact with Soul, unshed tears glistening in the one eye visible behind his lank red hair. "Oh, hello. Getting study snacks?"

Soul blinks.

Spirit looks as weary as he had the other day in the hospital. Heavy bags paint the undersides of his eyes and worry lines crease his formerly youthful face. But it's his eyes, hollow and hopeless behind a layer of tears, that stay with Soul.

"Yeah, uh, just grabbing some stuff for Maka," he says, glancing at the strawberries peeking out from his basket. Another look at Spirit's face is all it takes for Soul to grab the berries and hold them out. "You look like you need these more than I do."

It's worth it for the spark of light that returns to Spirit's eyes. "Thank you," he says slowly, glancing from the berries to Soul as if unsure he's really giving them up. Spirit still looks like he is expecting to wake up from a dream too good to be true when Soul clears his throat and turns to leave, pausing to glance back over his shoulder.

"Maka likes them with the stems cut off and whipped cream on top. Have a good day, Mr. Albarn."

Soul leaves Spirit looking at the berries with wonder and walks by the other side of the display to grab some peaches, hoping that Spirit gets a chance to mend the broken bridges he'd left behind in the wake of his divorce. Unease clings to his otherwise stable thoughts, but he does his best to ignore it; now that Spirit seems sincere in his efforts to rebuild a relationship with Maka, he should be fine.

After all, they have time.

/

What had been a fine mist becomes a steady rain by the time Soul returns home with snacks in hand, resigning himself to yet another evening spent unable to hear his music. Dropping the bags on the counter, he walks to the sliding door and rests his forehead against it. How much longer is he going to be so utterly _useless_ in this 'partnership?'

The doorbell rings and Soul peels his face away from the glass to answer it. Maka squeezes in before the door is fully opened and tosses her jacket onto a nearby chair, nearly trampling him on her way past. "We have a lot of work to do. Let's get to it."

She leads the way to the practice hall, hair long and loose in a way that reminds Soul of wheat fields and waterfalls, before he gets a grip and reminds himself that friends don't wax poetic about _friends_. In another time, in a different reality, maybe. For now, all he can do is try not to ruin this second chance at friendship.

"Okay," he mumbles when she raises an eyebrow at him over her shoulder.

"I'll need more than _okay_ from you. This is serious - since you've stopped playing and I moved away, Jackie and Kim have been absolutely decimating the local competition. Are you ready to put everything you have into getting top marks in the entrance exam?" She looks at him with the same steady gaze that normally makes his stomach flip and his heart shudder but lately has begun to give him courage.

His voice is steady when he answers. "Yes."

"Then let's get started."

As has been their routine for the past few weeks, Maka leads their practice sessions with strong, vibrant bow strokes and an unyielding sense of discipline. The songs she chooses change every few days as they try out different composers, but so far they all go well until that crumbling moment when Soul can't hear his music anymore.

A new knot grows in his stomach each time he sees her stiffen up and lose the fluid audacity that he's come to see as her musical fingerprint in order to compensate for the flatness of his playing. What's meant to be a careful balance of sound becomes a minefield of discordant notes and clashing harmonies that makes him wince for the brief moments when he can actually hear it.

After an hour of starting over again after the first few measures, Maka suggests a snack break with a poorly concealed frown. Soul manages a curt affirmative and strides out of the hall to get a handle on his mounting frustration. He knows it's not Maka's fault that any of this is happening, but he also can't stand to be in the same room with her when he can see how much it pains her to listen to him play.

She deserves so much more than he can offer.

The kitchen is quiet and still, stainless steel appliances glinting cooly around the old marble countertops his father had imported from Italy. While Soul grabs a couple peaches and runs them under cold water, he wonders about their actual chances of getting into Shibusen. Maka has made it clear Jackie and Kim are not to be taken lightly, and if what he's seen from casual internet browsing is to be trusted, they sound much more cohesive than he and Maka do now.

Either he gets his music back and they have a fighting chance, or he doesn't and damns them both.

He's just unwrapping the shortcake when Maka wanders in and perches on the countertop, sheet music in one hand and a red pen in the other.

"I was thinking maybe we can go over the changes I make to the song beforehand so it'll be easier for you to know what's coming next. Do you think that would be useful?"

Soul finishes plating the shortcake and begins to slice the peaches while he considers her question, their fuzz soft on the pads of his fingers. "I dunno. Maybe. Guess it couldn't hurt to try." Layer after layer, he arranges peach slices with whipped cream on top of the cake, garnishing with some mint leaves because no matter how long it's been, Soul doesn't think he'll ever be able to get Wes's voice talking about the importance of presentation out of his head.

"They out of strawberries?" Maka comes over to where Soul is finishing up their snack and pokes a finger out to grab a blob of whipped cream.

"Hey, go wash your hands," Soul grumbles, swatting at her. "And uh, yeah, they were." He thinks of Spirit's face when he received the berries and hopes they'll bring him that much closer to Maka.

"Ah, too bad."

"Yeah."

The following silence, while not _uncomfortable_ , feels off to Soul, disjointed. He picks nervously at his peaches because he can't shake the feeling that if he opens his mouth, he'll say something that will ruin whatever new beginning they've settled into.

"What are your dreams?" Maka asks casually around a mouthful of shortcake, like they've been working up to this conversation all along.

"Uh." Her demonic giggling as she crawled into his skin comes to mind, and he shivers.

"I mean, what do you want to do with your life? What kind of impact do you want to leave on the world after you're gone?" She's looking at him now, really looking, like she can see past the fatigue and the failure that comprises ninety-nine percent of his being and instead sees something worthwhile.

The weight of her stare makes him curl in on himself, still adjusting to the strange sense of unguarded vulnerability she draws out of him. "I don't know."

"Mm, I guess it is a hard question. I'll give you some time to think about it." She leans against the counter and closes her eyes. "I want to change as many people as I can with my music. I don't care about awards or solos or anything like that except for the size of the audience it gives me access to. I want to make sure I keep living inside them, you know?"

"What happened to being a better violinist than your mom?" It was all Maka would talk about after her mother left, just a year or so into their friendship, and the reason her sound hardened into something defiant and unyielding after Wes's willow-soft influence.

She smiles, but it's mechanical and somehow _wrong_ because her eyes are still closed and her forehead is scrunched like she's trying to shove something away. "Sometimes plans change," she says after a while, opening her eyes and looking out the window above the sink. "Come on, let's go finish practice. Thanks for the snack."

"No problem," he murmurs, noticing as he falls into place behind her that she had only taken a single bite of her shortcake.

/

The piano bench juts uncomfortably into the back of his head and he finds himself pressing into it, seeing how much pain he can tolerate until he gets the will to sit up and try again.

Maka had left hours ago after another disappointing practice session, but the sadness and worry in her eyes as she went prompted him to keep going. Tomorrow is the talent show, which means their entrance exam is two months away, and he's _still_ had no progress hearing his music again. So here he is, staring at the ceiling while he waits for it to return after his latest hearing test. Glancing at the clock, he shifts and pokes a key at random, hoping that he's gone through the worst and can start trying again.

Silence.

A muscle jumps in Soul's jaw. Like _hell_ is he going to let this stupid fucking piano get in the way of Maka's chance at Shibusen. For better or for worse, she's chosen _him_ to work with, and it's about time he pulled his weight.

He wants to believe her when she says he'll be able to hear the music again, but it's hard when all of the evidence points to the contrary. No matter how hard he batters against that twisted barrier in his mind, no matter how he strains his eyes to map the proper chords, nothing is changing for the better. Maka still winces as he plays, still softens her music to something easier _(more monochrome)_ to play.

Soul doesn't know how much longer he can stand to hear her gut her music because of him.

Shifting on the bench, he half-rolls until he's on his side and facing the window. The moon is almost full and makes the bushes that frame the glass glow in the slightly radioactive way of bones on an x-ray. With a sigh, he sits up and reopens the fallboard. There are more pressing things to do.

Experimentally, he positions his hand for a G-chord and pushes down. Given that it's only been about ten minutes since his last test, he's not surprised to find that he still can't hear anything. But he does notice some tension seep from his body into the keys, as if the mere motions of playing are enough to start draining away his fear of messing up, and he takes a deep breath. If this block is anything at all like how he sees it in his mind, then it's a wall to be torn down and there are more elegant ways to do it than brute force, as savagely appealing as that is.

The quiet in the room takes on a deeper tone as his eyes slip shut and the world shrinks down to the pads of his fingers. After a few minutes of breathing in slow, measured breaths, each key he presses begins to vibrate like peals of a great drum in his ribcage. There's still no sound, but instead a kind of motion stirs within him, like something blooming, as he continues to play. The thrumming builds in strength until it feels like each key is connected to a different part of his body, the vibrant C lighting up his arms while a more chaste A splashes navy blue upon his legs.

Each color lasts for just a moment, a staccato flash of life and brilliance before it sparks out like a blown fuse, or maybe just a blocked current, because Soul can _sense_ the energy buzzing behind whatever it is that deafens him. He plays a few notes in quick succession, lighting up his arms and chest and head and eyes and _yes_ , this is it, this is what he's been missing since the day he shut the door to the practice room and turned away without a second glance; _this_ is what he's been missing since life became a boring sea of _who gives a fuck_ and _why bother_ and the future hung like the sword of Damocles above his neck. As the percussion of his playing courses through him, leaving violent sprays of blue and purple across his back, he has a moment of clarity, an instant free from the frustration and self-doubt that is irrevocably connected to music in his mind.

Instead of falling, he flies.

The rising crescendo of the song lifts him up on spindly, fluorescent wings that beat in time to the music, a kaleidoscope of pulsing colors that change with each nuance of his emotions. Raw, powerful music courses from his heart to his hands and he revels in the completeness of it all, that feeling like life has just _clicked,_ and while everything still doesn't make sense, it's beautiful nonetheless.

As he feels his way through the flashing colors and smears of sound, he notices a pattern to the colors, vague impressions of sharp green and laughter like a full house. It's not entirely surprising, since she's the reason he tried to break the dam in the first place, but he still can't stop the soft smile that unfurls while he replays the melody. Her song has always evoked a kind of steadiness in him, a comfort in his skin that he attributes mostly to seeing himself the way she treats him, like someone competent, like an equal. Song combusts white-gold in his chest and energy crackles at his fingertips while he sends his music spiraling through the room for the first time, unleashed, since before the accident.

If only Maka could hear him now. He deepens the tone, adds a richness reminiscent of flowing hair and unwavering trust, and begins to hear something familiar in the music. It's her song, but more fleshed out than the first draft he cast away the other week. This is how it's meant to be played, moving his whole body, every nerve on fire to capture her spirit in song.

He plays beyond the final note on that scrap of paper, plays beyond what he thought he had the emotional capacity to play, and brings her song into the world whole and complete at last. Each measure of the harmony and soul-spun crescendo illuminates a different part of him until he's a strobe light of cycling sentient colors that make him wonder if he's finally lost it, because surely normal people don't get lost in a crashing river of sound-emotions when playing. But it's worth it to hear, and _feel_ , her song.

The last note rings out full and strong and he sits there, laughing and gasping by turn as he tries to catch his breath for the first time in over half an hour. Still high on both his success and the _rightness_ of it, he dives into their competition piece and grins at how easily it leaves his fingertips. Almost by reflex, he looks up to give Maka an excited smile.

Wes's gouged out face leers at him.

"No!" Soul howls, pounding the keys in defiance of his brother's presence. "You can't take this from me anymore! You can't! I'm stronger, now, I'm-"

"Strong?" he rasps, a cruel grin crawling across his face. "You've never been strong."

Wes points at Soul's hands and they go dark, the colors that had streaked them erased in an instant and the energy that had flowed through them abruptly cut off.

"No, stop, don't do this!" Soul lunges for the door and wrenches it open, footsteps pounding as he races down the hall and up the stairs to his room. He hears the harsh sound of screeching wires as he flies by Wes's room, but he he doesn't stop to get a better look.

Slamming the door behind him, he falls into his room, blood pounding in his ears. All is still for a minute and he relaxes marginally, hoping that the moment has passed and he's safe.

He's never safe.

Just one blink and Wes is there, in front of him, the silhouette of his violin bow stark against the moonlit window.

"You can't run from me, brother," he says, tapping Soul on the forehead. "I _am_ you."

Light drains from Soul's head like a spreading plague, all of his hard-won colors washing away like sidewalk chalk in a downpour. He falls forward onto his hands and knees and yells until it's all he can hear, until his voice breaks, until he can't breathe. Panting, he looks up, but Wes is nowhere to be seen.

Slowly, on shaky legs, Soul stands. He brings his hands to his face, but they feel numb, disconnected from his body. His eyes have adjusted to the moon shadows, but even so, everything looks washed out, and when he squints at his hands, he can't see that faint glow or aura or whatever it was that he was just beginning to understand when he was with Maka.

When he turns on a light, his hands still look ashen and cold, and he turns it back off almost immediately so he won't be able to get a good look at anything else. He shoves his hands under his armpits and huddles in the corner of his bed, staring at the door until keeping his head up becomes too much and he slumps onto his knees instead.

Dawn is so far away.


	6. The only fault

Soul doesn't sleep that night.

Morning dawns like a stab to the stomach, reds and oranges bleeding across the sky in softening hues until the sun climbs above the horizon. In just a few hours, Maka will show up at his door with her violin in hand and expect him to come to the talent show ready to take notes on the competition.

Moving is beyond him at the moment, so he just stares at the ceiling and listens to the stillness of his room. It vibrates in his head with the weight of an inhaled breath, that moment where the world pauses and anything could happen, and, god, it's so loud.

Eventually, he gets up and pulls on a tee and the first pair of jeans he can find, mindlessly shoving his phone into a pocket and stepping on an unwrapped granola bar that he throws into his backpack after a moment's consideration.

By the time he gets to school, Maka is leaning on his locker with a tight smile on her lips and murderous intent in her eyes.

"They moved the talent show to second period," she says tersely when he gets close enough to hear her. "So be ready to pay attention. Particularly to their pacing and coordination - we know they're both decent players on their own, but it'll be their teamwork that we're really playing against."

Soul nods and leaves his hand on his locker without opening it. He's never been the most competitive person in the world, preferring to coast indifferently through life, but Maka. She's always been ambitious, gunning for the top spot in everything she does, be it school or music or even a hobby. One time, she aggressively knitted nearly 300 sweaters for penguins recovering from an oil spill because Ox loudly proclaimed he was going to knit 200.

So as she leads him to his first period class with a plan to meet her in front of the lockers again before the talent show, he nods and even gives her the ghost of a determined smile.

"See you soon," she says, casually saluting and striding down the hall to her own classroom.

He spends first period twirling a pencil between his fingers so he doesn't vibrate into the next dimension bouncing his legs. If he can't hear the music again, well, he can't really think about that because there's not much they can do if it leaves him. Part of him still hopes that it's just something temporary, something that will disappear if he believes hard enough or can somehow right whatever cosmic wrongs he committed by not being a good enough brother or son or friend, but most of him thinks that this is fitting and that he deserves this cruel twist of fate for not appreciating what he had while he still had it.

Second period comes too soon, but Blake accosts him outside of his classroom before he can get very far.

"Good luck, break some legs, drop bows on 'em and all that," he says between some rapidfire finger guns, somehow managing not to trip over the giant ring of glowsticks trailing behind him like the train of a rave-themed wedding dress.

"Do I even want to know?" Soul says in response, not the only one in the hallway eyeing Blake's accessory.

"What? I got bored in class. Just wanted to show some support before you and Maka listen to the competition." Adjusting his - necklace? - with a flourish, he continues. "I also thought I'd pass along something Tsu told me earlier. She said she overheard Jackie saying something bad about Maka, like she's surprised Maka's back 'given her situation.'"

Soul frowns at this, but doesn't get a chance to respond because Maka appears behind him them and yanks him off towards the auditorium with only minimal eye rolling at Blake. She secures good seats in the middle front, the better to hear Kim and Jackie play and see small details in their styles, or so she says, and hugs her violin to her chest as she settles in. It's never far from her these days.

Another classmate of theirs, a tall, pale boy who straddles the line between cool and nerdy by being both one of the most talented skaters in the school and also the head of the honor society, introduces the talent show contestants. Soul doesn't pay much attention while the boy goes through the list of names and what they'll be performing; he has more important things to worry about, like the sly way Kim keeps looking at Maka and how Jackie won't meet his gaze.

When it's their turn, Kim and Jackie walk onstage amidst polite applause and bow. Jackie hardly looks at the audience and instead walks right over to the piano to test its pedals and adjust the bench. It's good not to pay them too much attention anyway, as it can get in the way of the focus needed to do well. She's good if she knows this.

The auditorium quiets when Kim raises her violin and sets her bow atop it, confidence implicit in her casual stance and easy smile. The silence only lasts a moment before Kim dives into the song, her music imbued with a kind of lighthearted intensity that gets stuck in Soul's head. She weaves her sound above and around Jackie's muted but steady accompaniment, somehow managing to both support and be supported by it in what Soul knows is the culmination of hours of practice and an innate sense of how the other is going to play.

About partway through the piece, Soul notices Jackie begin to subtly take the lead and build her own tempo into the hole Kim has left for her. Her growing intensity in the major keys and skillful increase in volume amplify the strident sound from Kim's rapidly flowing violin until the moment their sounds coalesce into something new and whole and glimmering.

They end on a strong, ringing note, and everyone in attendance rises to their feet for a standing ovation. Soul glances at Maka and sees her stand slowly, brows furrowed while she claps politely and strains her neck to see over the people standing in front of them. He wonders what she thought, and if she's as nervous as he is after that flawless performance.

Before he could do as much as nudge her, though, Kim clears her throat and raises her arms in what is probably meant to be a benevolent gesture but comes across looking a bit sinister.

"Thank you, dear students and staff. We're so happy you could come listen to us today as we prepare for the entrance performance for Shibusen Academy. But, as you know, we're not the only ones vying for these exclusive spots." She glances predatorily at Soul and Maka. "There are others hoping to get in as well, and wouldn't it be great to hear them play too?"

The crowd murmurs their assent while Kim continues to look at them like a cat would eye particularly juicy mice.

"So what do you say, you two? Care to play something for us? We're dying to hear what Death City's oldest duo sounds like these days."

"Of course we'll play," Maka snaps, defiant as always in the face of a challenge, while dragging Soul wholesale through the people boxing them into their row and murderously stomping onstage. "In fact, we'd be delighted."

Groaning, Soul takes his place at the piano as Jackie leaves, her face carefully neutral when she nods politely at him.

"Good luck," she says quietly on her way off stage, and something about the way she says it makes the hair on his arms stand up and dread pool in his stomach.

"We're fine," Maka mutters, glaring at Kim and Jackie as they take their seats in the front of the auditorium and grimacing when Kim blows them a kiss. "Let's do the Rondo again - no need to show them anything new."

"Mm." As Soul sits at the piano waiting for Maka to uncase her violin, he can't help but listen to the whispers drifting onstage.

Isn't he the orphan?

He came from that really musical family, right? The ones who all died a few years ago?

Why haven't we heard anything from him? Is he just not as good?

I really miss the way his brother played. There was something so magical about it.

Yeah, he misses it, too. With a deep breath, he adjusts his position at the piano and looks to Maka to see if she's ready yet. Violin tucked neatly under her chin, she nods at him once and gives him a small, genuine smile before turning to the audience. He watches the set of her shoulders for that small moment they relax, an old tell, and meets her when the first notes slide from her violin.

Almost immediately, he can't hear the piano. His hands move mechanically along the keys, still as gray and lifeless as they were when Wes banished whatever tiny fraction of his music he'd been able to recover. Without even thirty seconds of sound to help him gauge volume and tempo, he has to rely completely on the notes from her violin and his best guess at how quiet he needs to be.

She plays so quickly, though, charging forward in equal parts ferocity and the kind of attention to detail borne from hundreds of hours spent reading music theory books, and it fills him with a bittersweet longing he didn't know he was still capable of feeling. He doesn't have long to focus on it, though, because she soon begins adding her own flourish to the music and he flounders trying to improvise with her.

But then, curiously, Maka falters. It's a small mistake at first, but something he's sure she'd never usually mess up. It sounds like her fingering is off, a few ugly notes mixed into the otherwise smooth, gliding sounds. He thinks nothing of it until it happens again, and then again.

Worried, he looks up to see her breathing hard, fingers twitching erratically along the violin's neck and body moving disjointedly behind her bowing arm. Sweat makes her face shine and highlights the purple smears beneath her eyes that haven't seemed to disappear even though she leaves practice at a reasonable hour every day.

She suddenly shifts to a quicker tempo, though, so Soul has to focus on his own playing just to keep up. It's like she's on a train that's lost its brakes, careening into measure after measure with an unchained kind of chaos that he never thought he'd hear from her. He desperately tries to blend his sound into hers, but it's too late and he's probably too far off himself. Her music ricochets through the hall, splattering blood-red against the walls of the auditorium with each sawing, grating note.

They stumble through the end of the song, and while Soul is technically unsure how he sounds, it's probably more stable than stumbling, rampaging Maka. She stabs out the last note like a killing blow and then immediately rushes offstage, dodging around the stunned tech students.

Soul bows hastily to the audience and heads in the same direction, barely catching the hint of a smirk on Kim's face and a look of resignation on Jackie's before darting through the side doors.

Once he's in the hall, he listens, hoping to catch a hint of her footsteps on the tiled floor, and sure enough, he can hear someone rapidly moving towards the exit. He stumbles into a jerky half-run and gets to the opposite end of the hall just as Maka is shoving through the double doors that lead to the parking lot.

"Hey, wait up," he calls, following her out and wincing when the strong sunlight nearly blinds him.

Maka keeps walking though, maybe even faster than before, and god damn it all, Soul starts to run. There's no way she's okay after a performance like that, and it just doesn't sit right with him to leave her alone when he knows all too well how much failure is amplified in the echo chamber of your thoughts.

She reaches the edge of the parking lot and then stumbles, tripping and falling onto her hands with a small gasp of pain.

"Jeez, Maka are you-"

"I'm fine," she snaps, wobbling on her way back to standing. "I just let Kim get in my head too much. You don't have to baby me."

Soul recoils at the bitterness in her voice and just manages not to let the hurt contort his face. "Yeah, well, 'm not babying you, I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Isn't that what friends do?"

Her expression softens into something more tired than angry, and she sighs. "You're right, I'm sorry. It's just frustrating, you know?"

"Yeah," he says quietly, watching her blink a few too many times while she dusts herself off. "I know."

"I don't want to go back in there." She's staring at the front doors and flexing her hands, looking truly lost for the first time since he's known her. Maka's always had a plan, always had a strategy for victory, but losing is uncharted territory for her. That's more up his alley.

"D'you wanna leave? I can bring you home if you want."

She nibbles her lip, considering. "No, we probably shouldn't. We have to make the most of the time we're in school, right?"

Soul smiles weakly. "Sure. If you don't wanna practice today though, I understand. Maybe rest up or something."

"No, it's fine. I'll be over at the same time. You heard them - we can't afford to miss practice."

"I guess not."

With a short sigh, Maka pulls herself all the way up and squares her shoulders, glancing at him before she starts to walk back into school. "Hey, thanks. For checking up on me."

"Yeah, no problem." He thinks of how much energy she's put into helping him with both music and schoolwork since they've become friends again, and how he's just drifted along in her wake. "You can count on me, yanno, for stuff like that. Or if you wanna just come over to get away from your dad or whatever, that's cool, too. We're partners, right?"

She smiles, though her hands wander to her violin case almost tiredly. "Yeah, partners."

/

Soul stops by the store on his way home and grabs a pint of strawberries, heavy cream, and more shortcake. After a day like today, she deserves something nice.

He's just putting down the hand mixer when he hears the doorbell ring. He scurries to scoop out the fresh whipped cream into an inverted gallon bag so he can answer it. But by the time he finishes getting it settled, there are footsteps coming towards the kitchen and he turns around to the sight of Maka plunking her violin down by the foot of the table and collapsing into a barstool.

"How did you-"

"You haven't moved the spare key hiding spot," she says from beneath crossed arms, voice muffled by the countertop.

"Oh." He glances from Maka to the bag in his hand and decides he might as well get the shortcakes assembled while she groans to herself. With sharp, practiced motions, he pipes whipped cream onto the cakes and layers the strawberries atop them. A dusting of powdered sugar later, he slides a plate along the countertop near Maka's head.

She grumbles when he pokes her. "C'mon grumpy, I made you a snack. See, this time they had strawberries."

A low grunt is all he gets in return. He prods her arm with the plate. "Wanna talk about it?"

"Not really," she says, emerging from her folded arms with all of the speed and energy of a hamstrung tortoise. Sighing, she looks at the shortcake. "You didn't have to do this."

Soul scratches his neck. "I wanted to."

"Well, thanks," she says and takes a small bite, the juice from a particularly ripe berry dripping down the corner of her mouth and staining her lips bright red.

"So, are you ready to practice?" he asks after a few more minutes of watching her push her strawberries around the plate and stack pieces of shortcake in increasingly precarious piles.

"Yeah, I guess." She takes her time getting up and, instead of striding towards the practice room like she always does, does some slow toe touches and side bends.

"What are you looking at? We've been sitting all day. It's not healthy to sit for so long without some kind of exercise," Maka says when she notices Soul's quirked eyebrow. "Actually-" The tiredness disappears from her eyes while she looks at him, and a mischievous grin blooms on her face. "How about we warm up first? Tag, you're it!" She lunges forward to tap him on the shoulder and then darts back towards the main hallway.

"Maka, what the hell-"

"You've always been slow, Evans. You couldn't catch me if you tried."

Something about the challenge in her tone lights his blood on fire. "You're on, Albarn," he growls, scurrying around the island and grabbing for her arm. But she's quick, nimbly dodging just out of reach and sprinting towards the entrance hall, and Soul chases after her without missing a beat.

There are moments when he almost catches up, when he can feel the wind from her flying form, but she always leaps around a corner just before he can touch her. It's not long before he's panting because, well, he doesn't run much, but once Maka ducks behind another corner, he hears her footsteps slow and finally stop.

Jogging to catch up, he comes face to face with Maka staring at Wes's door and the handkerchief lying on the floor beside it.

"You know, Wes gave me his old violin before I left," she says quietly, not taking her eyes off of the door. "He said it'd give me good luck and keep me safe, but I can't help thinking that maybe that's why-" Her voice breaks, just a little, and she stops talking.

Soul can see her shoulders shaking and is torn between comforting her and simply leaving, since the prospect of being this close to his brother's room with all of the unfinished business between them makes the hallway shrink and his heart race.

"It's his." She's looking at the handkerchief, voice rough.

"Yeah." When Maka is quiet, Soul keeps talking, something about the still-present urge to comfort her loosening his tongue. "He left the night of the concert without it. I saw him drop it, and it was his lucky handkerchief, the one he'd wave at all his fangirls and the paparazzi and stuff, and I saw him drop it but I didn't say anything and let him leave without it. So, you know, it's not you." His throat is tight and time does that dripping thing again, warping and slowing so he's forced to notice every excruciating detail of her face as she listens.

"He wouldn't want this, would he." Maka gestures broadly at the hallway and the handkerchief and the two of them, eyes glistening, and her hand stops outstretched towards him, palm up, both a cause of and a salve to the pressure building white-hot in his chest.

"I should've stopped him, or been there, or..." he whispers, words tight and toxic in his throat. "I don't deserve to be alive."

The following silence roars in his ears, and he hardly registers Maka's fingers sliding between his as he replays his final view of Wes, handkerchief slipping softly to the ground while he hurried to be on time for the last concert he'd ever play.

Then the air is knocked from his lungs by two tiny, terrifyingly strong arms. "This isn't your fault, Soul," Maka says fiercely from somewhere around his ribcage. "Sometimes bad things happen, and it's not fair, and it sucks, and you wonder why it happened to you when it could have happened to any of the other seven billion people out there, but you know what? You can't change what's happened. You can only change what you do next, and sometimes those options aren't great either - but you're not alone, not as long as I'm here. And you do deserve to live, because you are alive and that's all the reason anyone needs."

She hugs him tighter, and he can barely choke out her name before she releases him and steps back, staring at the floor. "Don't leave me alone," she murmurs, still not making eye contact, and Soul crumbles inside because despite everything, he never, ever could.

He still has no words, so he just stands and listens to her breathe. Wes's handkerchief is just a few feet away, still locked in the past, and just the thought of his brother summons him, materializing next to the handkerchief with a sneer.

"She's lying, you know," he whispers as he walks to stand behind her. "You should have died with us."

"No, no." Soul starts pacing and tugs on his hair sharply, hoping the pain will jolt him out of this hallucination because he doesn't want Maka to see him like this, but it doesn't work. He can see the wallpaper through Wes's exposed cheekbones, and Wes bends to drape his hands around Maka's neck and peers around the side of her head while she looks at him, concerned.

"Oh, but it's true. Maka's always wished that it was you who died that night - you're just the next best thing." He's level with her head now, his bow jutting ominously from both sides of her neck as he continues to gently caress the line of her jaw.

Instead of answering, Soul takes a step back toward the handkerchief and Wes stiffens. "You're not brave enough," Wes snarls, releasing Maka and gliding toward him. "You wouldn't dare."

Glancing from Wes to Maka, Soul takes another step back and twists to pick up the handkerchief, the fabric discolored and dusty but still soft. "Goodbye, Wes," Soul says quietly, under his breath, as he folds it into his pocket just like Wes showed him way back when.

There's no explosion, no grand fanfare, as Wes simply begins to fade away. If anything, the hallway seems a little bit brighter once Wes finally disappears.

"Soul, are you okay?" Maka is glancing around the room at the last few places he'd been staring.

"Yeah, I'm fine now," he replies, standing up. "Just thought it was time I picked this up."

Her eyes are damp but she's smiling, now. "He'd definitely want you to have it."

"Yeah," he says, patting his pocket, looking at the empty space beside her. "I think you're right."

/

Soul begins to sleep.

Not always, and definitely not as consistently as he'd prefer, but it sure as hell beats the three or four day sleepless spurts spent paranoid that someone is in the house with him when he simply forgot he turned on the television. Mornings aren't so bad anymore either, not when he's blindsided by an appetite the size of Death City and actually prepares for it.

His mother's favorite cookbook has been buried under assorted kitchen clutter for years now, and he digs it out when the thought of Poptarts or yogurt for breakfast seems laughably inadequate. Some pages are marked with neat paper clips or strips of paper, and he flips to one that has a recipe for apple cinnamon breakfast bars. He smiles, noting the oily fingerprint stains from when he and Wes would help Mother cook, and turns on the oven.

School is likewise more bearable, both because the extra sleep appears to correlate directly with an increased attention span and because all of Maka's tutoring has had time to sink in. He passes his next two exams, if not with flying colors then with enough improvement to earn a lazy half-smile from Mr. Stein and a small nod of acknowledgement.

Music, though. That still eludes him.

"Try again. You were close that time." Maka is pacing alongside the piano, hair still wild from riding over with him after school, something Soul is still getting used to because she sort of just started showing up at his bike and raising an eyebrow as if to say what took you so long?

"Are you deaf? I lost it like two minutes in. If anything, I'm getting worse."

"This won't change overnight-"

"It's been a month, Maka. I'm beginning to think this isn't gonna happen." Soul leans back on the bench in the practice hall and exhales, opening and closing his hands so he doesn't succumb to the urge to punch the piano.

"Of course it will happen," Maka says, walking closer to the piano from the window seat she'd been sitting on. "But you need to-"

"If you tell me I need to 'believe in myself' or something like that, I'm gonna flip this piano," he growls, standing abruptly and pacing away from her.

"If you'd have listened instead of cutting me off, then you'd know I was going to say you need to keep digging for it because it isn't going to happen by getting angry and giving up," she snaps, following him to the corner and turning him around so she can see his face. "Look, I know this is frustrating, but you can't give up. We're actually sounding a lot better together."

Soul shrugs out of her grip and half turns, the weight of her stare too strong for him to bear. "Better won't beat Jackie and Kim. We both heard them, Maka. Unless we somehow score higher than them in the entrance exam, we're not gonna make it into Shibusen. It's-" he hesitates, looking at his shoes as he grinds out, "it's better for you if you drop me. You could easily make it in without me as dead weight."

Suddenly he's twirled around again, back hitting the wall near the window with a dull thud. "Oh, is that what you think?" Maka asks, eyes flashing dangerously. "Silly me, of course you'd know what's best for me. You have all the answers, don't you? When will you understand that I've made my decision and that you're the one I want to play with? You have to trust me, or this partnership will never work." She releases him and stalks back to the piano, sitting at the bench and taking a deep breath. When she looks at him again, the anger has been replaced with shrewd calculation, and Soul swallows. That look never ends well for him.

"Come here," she says, patting the bench next to her. "I have an idea."

"Idea for what?" he asks, cautiously sitting beside her.

Their hands brush when he settles in, and again there's that sense of belonging, a rightness in the physicality of being skin to skin.

She looks at him, something soft swirling behind her eyes before they're shielded by steel once more. "Do you trust me?" she says, and waits.

"Of course I trust you," Soul protests. "Hell, I wouldn't have played with you the first time if I didn't trust you-"

"Then prove it."

"Prove it how?"

"Give me your handkerchief."

"But that was Wes's-"

"Do you trust me?"

Slowly, Soul removes Wes's handkerchief from his pocket and hands it to Maka. He looks from it to her meaningfully, and she nods.

"Thank you. Do you have one of your own?"

"Why do you need these, again?"

She gives him a level look. "I'm asking the questions, here."

"Okay, yeah, I do. It's with my suits, though."

"Go get it. I'll wait."

With a dubious shrug, Soul leaves to grab one of his own handkerchiefs and returns to the practice hall, passing it to her once he sits back down at the piano.

She takes the two of them and knots two of their corners together so it's more like a small dish towel in size and then turns to him. "Okay, I'm going to tie it around your head now so you won't be able to see anything."

"What?" Soul yelps, scooting away defensively. "What good will that do?"

"All this time you've been relying on your sight when you can't hear the music anymore, and maybe that's doing more harm than good. Maybe you won't be able to get your sound back until you pull it from somewhere your eyes can't see." She folds the handkerchief in half and then in half again before holding it up expectantly.

Soul holds his breath. The thought of being blind scares him, but more than that the thought that he might still fail after this is terrifying. Up until now, he's always been able to mask his deafness by being able to see, and this will take that away from him. If he fails now-

"Trust me," Maka says. "I won't let anything bad happen to you."

Soul's laugh is more like a whimper. "You can't protect me from myself."

"True, but I already know you can handle yourself. Trust goes both ways, remember?"

It does. Looking at Maka sitting so determinedly, with such confidence in her eyes (about him, no less), gives him strength. He nods.

Maka's fingers brush the back of his head while she ties a small knot in the kerchief and then Soul's world is dark. Just two small pinpricks of light enter near the bridge of his nose, but it's not enough to see anything meaningful by.

"Okay, here's how this is going to work," Maka says. "You're going to play an easy song, something like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, a few measures at a time, and I'm going to repeat back to you what you just played. Got it?"

Soul nods, and Maka places his hands on the keys. "Your middle finger is on C. Start playing."

Hesitantly, Soul plays the first few notes of Twinkle Twinkle and pauses, hearing what he just played echoed back to him in the lower register by Maka. He smiles at the stutters in her sound; while Wes might have taught her the basics, she never took to the piano like she did the violin.

It's his turn again so he plays the next few measures of the song and waits for her to repeat it, hearing her become more confident each round. Somehow hearing what he's playing through her lets him relax a little, maybe because now it feels like they're both fighting this thing out together after so long spent fighting it alone.

They continue on like this for a minute or two before Soul feels the familiar dulling of his senses that pulls him away from his sound. He falters on the next note, no longer sure which keys he's on, and has his fears confirmed when Maka plays him back a disjointed string of notes.

Straining to catch any noise he might be making, Soul closes his eyes beneath the blindfold to no avail; all he hears is Maka's steady breathing and a small shifting of clothes on the piano bench. Her next repetition is a jarring clamor of mismatched keys and just-off chords, and Soul exhales quickly through his nose in frustration. Maka slides closer to him then, so that they're connected by the sides of their thighs on the bench, and he leans into the magnetic pull of her contact.

"How about you try a different song?" Maka suggests, tapping out the first few notes of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

He begins what he's relatively sure is the correct opening measure and is rewarded with Maka's answering notes ringing true. But his next turn goes sour when it turns out he is half a register too high. Frustrated, he drags out a short glissando and ends with his hands balled into fists on the keys, shaking slightly. To his surprise, Maka copies his notes as best she can given the nature of his outburst and then stills, expectant. She doesn't goad him or try to talk him into playing, just sits and waits for him like she knows beyond a doubt that he'll play.

Her quiet confidence emboldens him and he starts again, focusing less on physical cues than on how it makes him feel. Soon he loses himself in the echoes of Maka's sound, which become stronger and stronger and begin to remind him of looking in a funhouse mirror, approximately the same but with some parts blown out of proportion. It's strange but also comforting to hear his notes echoed and distorted through her, to hear her sketch a rough outline of who he is in her mind.

As he continues to play, the pauses between Maka's responses grow shorter until she no longer pauses, needing to constantly play to keep up with the music flowing from his fingertips. He thinks of her, of Wes, of his parents, and of all the things he wishes he could have told them as he finally, wholeheartedly, surrenders.

A torrent of different colored feelings attack him, loud reds and melancholy lavenders and indifferent grays, and he accepts them all. Directing their energy to the piano, he simply plays, no longer worried about hitting every single note just right as he instead welcomes the tumultuous sound he hears from Maka's side of the piano.

Except then he feels warm hands on the front of his face as his blindfold is pushed up and he's squinting into Maka's grinning face. "That was beautiful," she says, throwing her arms around him in a tight, fierce hug. "I knew you could do it."

"Do what? I just played some things and you played them back…" he trails off as he replays his final minutes in his mind; they were higher on the register than he remembers Maka being able to reach from her position. "Oh."

"'Oh' is right. That was all you the last four or so minutes. I gave up trying to keep up with you after a while."

Feeling raw and drained, like he'd actually offered some vital piece of himself to the piano, Soul takes in the swath of keys before him with his newly retrieved sight and hovers a finger over a random note. He plinks it, and the clear sound of a high G pierces the room. Heart pounding, he turns back to Maka as a slow, wondrous smile spreads across his face. "I can hear it again. It's clear, it's-" He stops to go back and play a few measures of Chopin and then, like bubbles spilling from trapped air at the bottom of the sea, he laughs. Rich, deep, cathartic laughter fills the room in addition to his scraps of song, and when his stomach hurts and his mouth is sore from smiling, he brings a hand to his face and realizes his cheeks are wet.

Maka is grinning at him, eyes shining with happiness and confidence and something he doesn't understand, and he wants to crystalize this moment forever. Taking his hand in hers, she squeezes it and murmurs, "I'm proud of you. That didn't sound easy."

"It wasn't."

They sit in silence for a moment while Soul just breathes, letting the joy at being able to hear his music again settle deep inside his bones. He notices her breathing sync with his and gets an idea, a very self-indulgent idea, but he's still flying high enough on his victory that he's not afraid to ask.

"Hey, Maka? Let's play together again."

She blinks, surprised. "But I really can't play more than easy songs. I can't keep up with you on the piano."

"Don't worry about it. I have an idea."

She shrugs and straightens up at the bench, ready to begin. His heart swells at how easily she accepts his unexplained plan; she's right, trust does go both ways.

He nods at her to begin and she starts in with a simple rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb, echoes of his style still clinging to the way she moves from key to key. Once she begins the reprise again, Soul begins softly accenting her notes with small trills and complementary chords.

His eyes drift shut as he focuses on her sound, strong, unfaltering, golden, and lets go.

They may not make it into Shibusen, but as Soul wraps his music around hers and feels it deepen in intensity, he knows that they'll face any danger together, and that together they'll overcome.


	7. Motorcycle drive by

The next few weeks blend together in a haze of exam prep, piles of sheet music, and the simple joy of being able to hear music again.

Somehow their practice nights have bled into informal sleepovers and early breakfasts, Maka curled up on the couch snoring softly while Soul tinkers with the piano. She gets tired around midnight, but it's still hard for him to fall asleep until two or three, so most nights he plays well past the point when she dozes off.

"Hey, what song is that?" Maka murmurs sleepily one night after a particularly good practice session, snuggled beneath two blankets on the floor with a textbook under her head.

"Hm?" He thought she fell asleep an hour ago, lulled by whatever advanced math or physics she was studying, and had just been playing whatever came to mind.

"It's pretty," she mumbles, re-wrapping the blankets around herself until she looks like a snug burrito. "I've never heard it before."

After paying more attention to the melody, he groans internally - it's her song. He's been playing _her song_ for the last god knows how long, and he shifts on the piano bench, feeling bare. "It's just somethin' I came up with."

"Makes me feel safe." She rolls over and curls into a ball, but Soul can still just barely make out her last sleepy words. "Thanks again for being my partner."

It feels like flying when he plays the melody, uplifting and fierce and violent but also devastatingly beautiful. It's enough. "No, thank _you,_ " he says softly after he's sure she's fallen asleep, watching the even rise and fall of her chest and counting the freckles on her nose.

A little later, when he's finally tired enough to sleep, he closes the fallboard and notices Maka has flung her blankets off. Carefully, he drapes them back over her tiny shoulders and nearly jumps out of his skin when she sighs and cups a hand around one of his. It's electric, instantaneous, how her touch makes his heart surge and blood pound in his ears, and she will never, ever know. He's always going to be Wes's younger brother and stand-in partner to her, and as much as that stings, it's worth it to be able to see her unguarded and open and honest like this.

He tries to tug his hand out of hers, but she's tenacious and he's not sure he can extricate it without waking her up. After another tentative attempt, he gives up, choosing instead to lie on his side in front of her and throw half of her extra large blanket over himself one-handed. This close, he can trace Orion's belt and Lyra in the freckles on her cheeks and he closes his eyes, her song still echoing in the back of his mind.

The next morning, he wakes up to an empty pile of blankets and the siren smell of frying bacon. By the time he rolls over and shuffles off to the bathroom to get dressed, Maka is waiting by the door tapping her foot and shoves a piping hot breakfast wrap into his hands. "Let's hurry it up, we're going to be late."

"You could have woken me up sooner," Soul grumbles as he tries to keep up with Maka's speed-walking, juggling the scalding wrap between both hands and hissing when a glob of molten cheese spills onto his finger.

Maka shrugs, reaching under the seat to grab his spare helmet. "You looked comfy."

They pull up to the parking lot with five minutes to spare and jog into the building, Maka making it look easy despite carrying a backpack that's easily over half her body weight.

"So I'll just come home with you, okay? I told my dad we're having another study party at your place tonight so he doesn't, well," she makes a hand motion somewhere between "eh, what are you gonna do" and the universal sign for a slit throat. "Sound good? I'll meet you here after last period. Good luck on your test today, and don't forget to actually bring a pencil to class this time. Mr. Stein told me he's going to start docking points from now on."

"Yes mom," he says, rolling his eyes, but goes back into his locker for another pencil anyway. "And you're sure your dad'll be okay with this?"

There's a hint of strain beneath the lightness of her tone. "Yeah, he's been a lot more lenient with me about that kind of thing lately."

"...Okay."

"See you later." She salutes with an easy smile and walks away, Wes's old violin bouncing on her back.

Shaking his head, Soul realizes he's smiling, too, and marvels for a moment at the plain sort of happiness he's found.

/

She's late.

She's _never_ late, or, at least, has never been late as long as he's known her. Soul paces in front of the lockers for the first fifteen minutes, assuming she got held up by a professor congratulating her on having the highest grade in the class or offering her full-ride scholarships or something, but when there's still no sign of her, he sets off for the library, figuring that would be the most likely place for her to lose track of time.

When she's not there, he tries the music room. And Mr. Stein's office. And the entire first floor. He's about to see if Tsubaki is still around to check some ladies' rooms when Ms. Mjolnir rounds the corner and nearly tramples him. "Oh, Soul, hello," she says, blinking up at him. "What are you still doing here?"

A clock on the wall reads three thirty, a little over an hour after school let out, and Soul is trying not to let the worry simmering in his gut color his words. "I'm just trying to find Maka, but she doesn't seem to be around. Have you seen her?"

He hopes he imagines the flash of sympathy that sparks behind her eyes. "I'm sorry Soul, but I'm not allowed to talk about it. I can only tell you she had to go home, and that maybe you should call her later." She smiles in a sad, wilting way that makes his skin prickle.

"Okay, thanks Ms. Mjolnir. Have a nice day."

Once she's mostly down the hall, Soul turns and sprints to the parking lot, whipping out his phone and calling Maka while he runs.

It goes straight to voicemail.

Not again. He can't do this again. The deafening roar of his motorcycle revving brings him back to reality just enough to allow him to speed out of the parking lot without running anybody over, but once he hits the main roads, he sort of hovers outside himself, disconnected and static along the edges. It's only when he stops at a red light that he realizes he's more than halfway to Maka's house and squeezes the handlebars to stop his arms from shaking. If she's not okay-

The light changes and he's off again, the roar of his motorcycle and the wind in his ears drowning out thoughts about Maka's condition. Once he arrives at her house, he freezes, the urge to see if she's okay at war with the fear of finding out she's not.

But if there's one thing he's learned from Maka these past few months, it's that fear must be met head-on. So he squares his shoulders and walks to her front door, hands trembling, and knocks. But immediately afterwards, his phone rings.

Still-numb fingers fumble to get it out of his pocket, but when he finally does it's Maka's number glowing up at him.

"Maka, geez, you scared the shit outta me, are you-"

"Hello, Soul. It's Spirit."

Soul freezes. "Hello, sir. Is Maka-"

"She's okay, yes. Resting now, but she wouldn't calm down until I promised to call you." There's a small, rueful laugh that's muffled by the speakers. "She seems to think you'd burn the city down or something if you didn't know what happened."

"What _did_ happen?"

Spirit is quiet for a moment. "She fell," he says eventually, voice monotone. "Doctors are looking into it. Maka told me to tell you-" a small breath, a loud swallow, "to tell you she'll be fine and not to worry. She'll be in touch after she rests more."

Soul's head is spinning. "Thanks for letting me know."

"Of course. And Soul?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you for being her friend." Spirit hangs up first, leaving Soul to stare at her name in his call log until the angle of the sun reflects off his phone and drags him back to the present. Slowly, he walks to his motorcycle and drives home, the colors of the sunset streaking like rusty arrows through the sky.

The next few hours are purgatory. Soul can't stop analyzing her every word, her every expression that morning for anything that might have signaled something was wrong.

He can't let her become another Wes.

Finally, as he's staring at the ceiling trying for the umpteenth time to fall asleep, his phone buzzes. He grabs it and swipes into his messages in one motion, heart pounding because she's finally texting him and he still can't shake the feeling this whole thing is his fault, somehow.

[[Hi. I'm sorry if I worried you today, but I'm fine now. Just fainted again.]]

[[that doesn't sound like fine to me]]

[[You're going to have to take my word for it.]]

[[so when will you get outta there?]]

[[I don't actually know. They're keeping me here for some extra testing, so at least another day. Speaking of, would you be able to bring me my violin and missed homework after school tomorrow? I don't want to get stiff not practicing]]

[[yeah, sure thing.]]

[[Great, thanks. Get some sleep, okay?]]

[[you sure you're okay?]] How easily Wes laughed before he left that night still haunts him.

[[I'm fine, don't be such a worrywart. See you tomorrow, and really, sleep.]]

[[night maka]]

Something unsettles him about her being in the hospital for extra testing, but the constant state of fight or flight he's been in all day has left him too tired to give it more thought. He curls up in bed and stares at the flickering colors behind his eyelids for a while before reaching for his phone again.

Quietly, he pulls up the audio file Maka had sent so long ago and closes his eyes.

/

"Hi, I'm here to see Maka Albarn."

The receptionist looks flatly from the violin case on his back to the overstuffed backpack in his hands and sighs. "Room forty-two. Visiting hours are over at ten, and -" she glances at the violin again - "no loud noises. Here's your badge."

Nodding, Soul tosses the lanyard around his neck and wanders in what he's mostly sure is the right direction before almost running into a very large, muscular nurse with a strange eye who bodily turns him around and sends him on his way with a friendly, cough-inducing slap on the back. It's not long after that he finds her room and knocks hesitantly.

At her muffled, "Come in!" he pushes the door open and is once again struck by the sight of her in a hospital gown, attached to an IV. "Well don't just stand there, come here," she says dryly when he just stares at her. "And give me my violin - two days is far too long to not be playing with the entrance exam around the corner."

Her eyes are still too purpled with shadows. But he complies with a small grunt, dropping her backpack at the foot of the bed so he can unsling her violin from his shoulder. She immediately runs her hands along the case, unlatching each clasp with a delicate twist of her fingers and plucking a few strings once she lifts it free.

She begins to play a small warm-up melody, and somehow just hearing her music is enough to calm him. As long as she feels well enough to play, everything is fine.

During a pause in the song, her stomach rumbles. "Want me to grab somethin' to eat?" She does look a bit gaunt under closer inspection, cheekbones more prominent than he remembers and a strange translucency to her skin that gives him goosebumps. He stands before she can give a proper answer. "I'll be right back."

Luckily the hospital cafeteria isn't entirely useless, and he grabs a couple of wraps full to bursting with various leafy greens and colorful vegetables before heading back.

"Here." He places one of them on her lap along with a water bottle he belatedly picked up at the register and drags a chair next to her bed so he can eat with her.

"You didn't have to do this," Maka protests, nevertheless beginning to unwrap the packaging.

"Consider it our daily snack."

That makes her smile, and she takes a giant bite, hummus and a loose tomato slice sliding comically down her chin. Soul snorts and pulls a napkin from the bag to wipe across her lips, and it's only when both of their eyes widen at the same time that he thinks he probably crossed a line.

"Sorry 'bout that, you had a thing on your-"

"No, no, it's fine, thanks?"

His hand is still on her cheek. "Can't let my partner walk around with food all over her face, right?" he says weakly, amazed that she hasn't tried to shove him away yet.

"That's true. Thanks, partner." Amusement sparkles in her eyes while she deliberately wipes her chin against his napkined hand before sitting back.

Hand still tingling from that brief contact, he changes the subject before he does something stupid like _blush_. "So why Shibusen, anyway?"

"Well, it's the best music school in the state, and even nationally, it gives Juilliard a run for its money." She turns to look out the large window that runs along one wall of the room. "It's also where Mama went to school."

He shifts in his seat and lets the silence settle. "Wes went there, too," he says quietly after a moment, watching some cactus wrens flit around outside. "Graduated top of his class."

Maka smiles sadly. "I know."

"D'you really think we have a chance?" he asks after letting the weight of that roll past them.

She sighs, twisting around to fluff her pillows. "I think we have as good a chance as they do. It'll all come down to how well we play that day, right?"

"Right."

"Anyway, I don't want to take up your whole afternoon. You don't have to stay here all night; Papa will be here in a few hours after he gets out of work."

The thought of her here alone for any amount of time makes his heart clench. "It's fine, I brought stuff to do. I'll hang out 'til your dad comes, at least." When she opens her mouth, he says, "And I promise I'll practice when I go home. _Later._ Deal?"

Her mouth clicks shut and she gives him a wry smile. "Okay, fine. I hope that's homework you brought to do - Shibusen _will_ also look at your grades, you know."

He smiles. "Yeah, I know."

/

She doesn't come back to school that week.

Or the week after. Every day after school, he throws whatever books he needs into his backpack and drives to the hospital to spend the few hours before her dad gets there with her and listen to her practice.

Sometimes Liz comes with him, or Blake, and they laugh and joke as if nothing's wrong and Maka is full of easy smiles and scathing comments when Blake tries to climb out her window ("Spiderman's got nothin' on this!") or when Liz tries to put her hair in towering updos that require a cough-inducing amount of hairspray. Sometimes he lets Blake drag him to hang out after they leave Maka tucked in with a book and a half-smile, and he's relieved when Blake just throws an arm around his shoulder and lets him be as engaged or not as he's feeling that night.

When Maka is still in the hospital at the beginning of the third week since she fell, he begins to find excuses to poke her about it. Every time he asks, though, she says variations of, "Just another day!" or "There's just one more test they want to do," which does nothing for his steadily growing anxiety. The entrance exam is only a month away now, and they haven't been able to practice together in too long.

Maka doesn't look the same, either. Those bags she'd never quite been able to conceal are as purple as ever, and there's something so subtly different in the way she carries herself that he can't tell if it's just the way she's propped on the bed or if she really is slouching more.

"Maka, you sure you're gonna be able to compete?"

She's nose deep in one of her larger textbooks after only practicing for ten minutes, the shortest amount of time she's played yet, but even from his position across the room in an uncomfortable side chair, he sees her stiffen.

"Yes, of course. Why do you ask?" The slight challenge in her voice makes him wince, but he forges ahead anyway.

"Well, you've been stuck here for weeks now, you won't tell me what's really going on, and you don't seem to play much anymore. Doesn't look promising." His tone is rougher than he'd meant it to be after literal _weeks_ worth of worry and frustration, but he meets Maka's gaze when she puts down the book to glare at him directly.

"Not you, too," she snaps, pulling herself up to as much of her unimpressive height as she can while being swaddled in blankets on a hospital bed. "I thought out of everyone, you'd bother me the least about all that."

"'All that?' Maka, _you're in the hospital._ What kind of friend wouldn't be worried about you?" The words fall out of his mouth while he glances at her arms, which are shaking slightly until she fists them in the sheets.

"Wes wouldn't," she says, eyes like daggers. "He knew when to _let me be_."

That _burns_ , and Soul lets the sudden wave of anger roll him under. "Yeah, well, I'm your partner now, and I care if you can't get out of bed on your own or hold your bow straight."

"You don't know _anything_ about that!" she cries, throwing off her blankets and swinging her legs to the side. "See, I can stand and walk just fine on my own, _Dad."_ The way she spits that last word is like a slap to the face, and Soul opens his mouth to retaliate when her whole body stiffens.

She stops, brows furrowed, and sort of reaches forward with a hand that then falls limp at her side. Head cocked, she looks at it blankly before her eyes roll back and a host of monitors start beeping urgently.

Who knew the world could end on a Wednesday?

A host of nurses bursts in, expressions grim as they begin to hold down Maka's twitching limbs. Soul is shuttled forcibly out of the room and trips his way down to a lounge at the end of the hall before collapsing, numb, into one of the weary looking stuffed couches. He's still for a moment until the sheer weight of what happened sends him rocketing back to the nurse's station halfway down the hall.

"Hey, do you know what happened to Maka Albarn-"

"I'm sorry, but we can't discuss patient matters with those who aren't family." The nurse gives him a flinty smile and points him back the direction he came.

"But she's my best friend-"

"I'm sorry sir, but you're going to have to step away now." A harder edge to her voice makes Soul stop and retreat to the couch, head in his hands and heart racing as he wonders if that was the last conversation he'll ever have with her.

Some time later, a dull thump to his right pulls him from his stupor. Spirit sits down next to him, pale and shaking and the most terrified Soul has ever seen him.

"Hey, is she okay?" Soul can't help but ask; he has to know, has to be reassured that this is just a fluke and he's not going to be haunted by Maka's ghost, too.

Instead of answering, Spirit curls down until his elbows rest on his knees and his hands grip the sides of his head, rocking softly. "You know," he begins, voice shaking, "I stopped seeing other women. I left her mother alone, I made dinner and asked about her day and I _listened_ and brought her those honey lemon cough drops when her throat was sore and it doesn't matter. It never mattered."

His deep breath becomes a cough which then morphs into a dry sob, and another, and another, until he's choking on the force of them and folding so far forward he slides off the couch.

"My baby girl is dying and there's nothing I can do about it."

There's nothing to say, really, nothing at all Soul could possibly add that would be meaningful in any way, so he just sits next to Spirit as he cries himself out on the cold hospital floor.

Once his sobs turn to labored breathing and then finally something approaching calm, Spirit lifts his head and sits back on the couch. "She really liked those strawberries, you know," he says quietly, eyes still glistening, an intense earnestness swirling in them that Soul doesn't quite understand. "She said they were the sweetest berries she'd had all summer, and then," his voice cracks and he has to clear his throat, "then she _smiled_ at me. It was the first time she'd done that since her mother had been around, and I thought maybe I'd fixed what was broken between us. But this." His hands shake while he drums an off-tempo beat on the couch's arm. "How am I supposed to fix _this_?"

"She can't die," Soul whispers, throat tight while he stares at the dirt on his shoes. "She can't die, she never even told me anything was _wrong_ , what is going _on?_ " He only realizes he's yelling by the end when Spirit looks at him with the most heart-breakingly compassionate expression and pulls him into a tight, full body hug.

Soul is still pressed to Spirit's chest when a nurse approaches them, footsteps heavy and slow. "Which one of you is Spirit Albarn?"

Spirit immediately disengages and half-raises a hand. "That's me, is she okay? Is she going to be okay?"

The nurse smiles, but it's taut around the edges. "She's okay for now. It was definitely a close call and she's in the ICU, but you can come sit by her while she sleeps off the rest of her meds."

Spirit takes a shuddering breath and whispers a waterfall of thanks, falling into line behind her as she presumably begins to lead the way to Maka's new room. When Soul hesitates, glancing from the nurse to Spirit and back again, Spirit throws an arm around his shoulders and says, "He's with me."

The nurse looks at Soul dubiously but waves him on, and then it's just a few achingly sterile hallways until they're walking into a room filled with machines that softly whirr and click as they step quietly up to the bedside.

Maka looks deflated, drained. An IV snakes out of her arm, and there are purple splotches around the needle where they must have tried half a dozen times before one took. Her breathing is shallow.

"She probably won't wake up for at least another four hours," the nurse tells them, sympathy rising through the businesslike way she's spoken to them so far. "The cafe makes really good hot chocolate, if you want to get comfy."

"Thanks," Spirit says absently, staring at Maka's face and rubbing small circles on her hand that isn't attached to the IV.

Soul walks around to the other side of the bed and brushes a strand of her hair behind her ear, fingers lingering near her pulse. She'd been so vibrant just a few hours ago.

"I'll go get us some of that hot chocolate." Spirit gives her hand a final, gentle squeeze and then walks back out, leaving Soul alone to keep her company.

"I'm sorry about earlier," he murmurs, resting a finger against her cheek. "It's just frustrating not knowing if you're okay. I won't say that kinda stuff if you just get better." He pulls a chair close to her bedside and rests his head carefully next to hers. "I can't lose you, too."

Gently, he weaves his fingers through hers. "You gotta get better. You're strong, you've always been so strong, and once you beat whatever this is we're gonna go to Shibusen together, okay, and then we'll play in _all_ the major cities. You like to travel, right? London, Paris, New York - you name it, we'll be there. Just, you have to get better, okay?" He rolls his head just a little until their foreheads touch. "Okay?"

When Spirit returns with the hot chocolate, Soul sets his aside and stares at the steam curling towards the ceiling.

/

The next few days are torture. Maka is awake, but only for a few delirious hours in which she eats a little and asks for Wes. Finally, on the eighth day, she's lucid enough to have a conversation, and Soul sits on the edge of his seat while he asks her the same questions he has the past few days. "Do you know what month it is, Maka?"

She frowns at him, hair lank and loose around her shoulders. "Of course I do. It's February, and we're about a month away from playing in our entrance exam."

"That's bullshit and you know it. You almost _died_ , Maka, and you _still_ won't tell me about it."

A muscle in her jaw twitches. "Don't worry about me. Worry about how we're going to play during the exam."

Soul stands up and runs an exasperated hand through his hair. "Of course I'm going to be worried about you! Fuck, Maka, you can't just clam up about this! I'm your partner, can't you _trust_ me for once in your goddamn life?"

The little bit of fire in her eyes dims. "I do trust you, really. I just don't want to do this right now."

"Do you promise to tell me, though?" he asks softly, watching her hands tremble on top of the sheets.

"Yes. I do." She looks at him, _really_ looks at him for the first time since before her collapse, and it's like they're back in the practice hall that day he finally reclaimed his music _._ "I'll be fine to play by the time we have our exam. So let's just focus on that, okay?"

Soul looks at her sunken cheeks, dull hair, and eyes that are creased with exhaustion. "Sure. For now."

/

And so goes each day until the exam. Liz and Blake come over more often with Soul, glimmers of worry lurking behind their increasingly tight smiles as they try to talk about anything but the fact that she's still sick and won't say more than "it'll be fine."

Maka is begrudgingly released from the hospital two weeks after her second fainting scare, though she's under strict bedrest orders with the understanding that she'll return to the hospital after the exam, and so Soul comes to visit her instead. He notices her practice for less and less time as the exam day draws nearer, and in turn throws himself more fully into late nights at the piano, belting out his newfound sound so she won't have to shoulder all of the burden herself.

On the big day, Soul dresses in his pinstripe suit and carefully folds Wes's handkerchief into the front pocket. As they'd agreed over late night texts the night before, he arrives at her door a good thirty minutes early to collect her for school and has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from gaping at how beautiful she looks in her flowing black gown.

He stays with Maka the whole day, classes be damned - if they want to throw him out, they'll have to do it by force - but teachers just glance at him with a kind of stoic acceptance that only puts him more on edge.

But soon enough he doesn't have time to think about that, because Maka is slowly but determinedly tugging him towards the auditorium and it takes all of his focus not to get separated in the afternoon rush.

They sign in with the proctor and this time they're number four, after Jackie and Kim and a few others who came forward after the talent show, so they find a small, quiet corner close enough to the stage entrance that they can still hear the competition but far enough that they have some space to themselves.

Kim flutters her fingers at them as she walks by with Jackie when it's their turn, and Soul glares coldly when he feels Maka shift next to him.

"Don't worry 'bout them," he mutters, leaning closer to her. "We'll be fine."

"Yeah. Of course." She's fiddling with the hem of her dress now, raising her head sharply every time the floorboards near them creak, and the tightness in his chest that's been there since before she collapsed snaps. He grabs her hand and whispers, "Hey, you have me, remember?"

Smiling weakly, she squeezes his hand back. "Yeah."

Her face is still drawn, though, and now she's taken to latching and unlatching the clasps on her violin case, so Soul releases her hand just long enough to gently move it off of her lap and rest in the space between them. "There," he says, resettling her hand on top of the case.

They sit there in silence while Jackie and Kim play, the duality of Kim's energetic violin and Jackie's subdued piano lending a unique twist to their song Soul is sure the judges will appreciate. He takes a deep breath - they'll need to dig deep if they want to win.

The proctor waves them over while the audience applauds Jackie and Kim. When Soul stands, Maka's hand tightens in his. "Thank you," she says softly, rising with her violin. "Whatever happens out there, I want you to know I'm glad you were my partner."

"I'm still your partner," he replies, unbalanced by the uneasiness that's clung to him all day.

Another sad smile. "Right."

There isn't time for more conversation as Maka leads them onstage, violin resting against her neck while she waves at the crowd with her bow in hand. Soul takes his place at the piano and adjusts the seat before nodding at Maka over his shoulder. It's time.

They'd settled on Paganini's _Caprice No. 24_ before her stint in the ER, one of the harder technical songs to play but one that, done well, will earn them a lot of respect from the judges. Maka, of course, wanted to go all out for this exam.

She dives right in, strong, piercing notes flying from her violin, and he meets her with some accent chords while her fingers skip along the neck and she energetically stutters her bowing arm. Then as one, they slow, Maka languidly slurring more demure notes into a few moments of dusky calm before charging back into staccato sounds and rapid bow movements.

Soul highlights and supports her music with answering calls to her melody and low, rumbling contrasts to her sharp trills. When she bounces her bow off the strings and scatters sparks of staticky sound to crackle along the edges of their song, he fills in the gaps with a callback of twinkling high notes, and breathes in the special sense of unity he gets by merging his music with hers.

After they crest the midpoint of the song, Maka begins to stumble, sweat dripping down the back of her neck and arms shaking slightly during intermittent pauses. It's clear she's running out of fuel, but as Soul thinks of how many weeks they spent practicing together these past few months, he knows she just needs a little extra push to get through this.

He plays a little louder, catches her eye when she glances at him over her shoulder and leans back with a lazy smile, the pocket holding Wes's handkerchief prominently displayed. Her eyes ignite and her tone takes on that brazen, fearless quality that's never stopped intriguing him as she pours everything into her music.

It swells to fill the auditorium with each jaunty flit of her bow and every strident note that beats like a pulse in Soul's chest. He layers his music through hers, blurring the edges between their parts until the boundary between them does not exist, _could_ not exist because of late nights dozing on the couch and homemade whipped cream.

The depth of his own sound reverberates through him and finally, _finally_ , he can hear it, finally he can ride these tumultuous highs and feel the gritty happiness of a life made technicolor. He's not dragging her down this time but lifting her up, sharing in this music they made together.

They end on a ringing crescendo and the crowd rises as one to a standing ovation. Adrenaline makes his hands shake and his knees weak, but they did it, together, and when he joins Maka at the front of the stage, it's with a grin large enough to match hers.

Hand in hand, they wave to the crowd.

It's easy to forget, in that moment, how close to death she'd been. But afterwards, when they're wading through the audience to be embraced by Blake and Liz, he sees again how heavy her steps are and the beads of sweat falling down her nose.

"You wanna go back?" he asks after she almost drops her violin case for the third time in as many minutes.

"No, I'm fine, I don't need-" She stumbles and catches herself on his arm. "Fine, let's sit down."

They stay after for about an hour before Soul, seeing the growing slump in Maka's shoulders, drags her back to the parking lot and gets her settled on his motorcycle. He drives extra slowly because her grip seems weaker than before, and eventually he walks her back to her hospital room while Spirit works another double shift.

"You played so well today," she says when she comes out of the bathroom, back in that hospital gown covered with ugly little dots. It makes her look older, sadder, more fragile than ever.

"So did you." Despite a few missed notes in the middle, her music had a kind of raw intensity that carved itself into his bones.

"I just hope it'll be enough, you know?" Maka looks at her hands and traces the heartlines on her palms. "We still have to wait for final exam grades to get posted before they release placement info."

"Just another month, then." Soul pulls a chair next to her bed and pulls out a notebook, hoping to maybe distract her from the fact she's back here with some math questions.

"Time's flown, hasn't it?" she says, still looking at her hands. "Feels like we've done so much, and yet there's still so much I want to do."

He puts the notebook aside. "Like what?"

With a small sigh, she shakes her head. "Nothing worth mentioning. Let's study for our math finals - I can answer your questions while I work on my problem set."

After a few minutes listening to the slight scratching of pencil on paper, Soul says, "I think I wanna see about getting back into the music scene. Maybe start playing locally again, try out some different genres or somethin'. Maybe," he doodles some spirals in the margins, "play with you more."

She doesn't look at him. "Yeah, maybe."

The rest of the night is spent quietly doing school work until a nurse politely reminds him that visiting hours are over. On his way out, he turns to wave goodbye but her eyes are already closed, forehead creased and hands strangling the sheets.

The faint tear tracks on her cheeks haunt him when he closes his eyes to sleep.


	8. Love's sorrow

Maka doesn't come to school anymore.

Ms. Mjolnir pulls Soul aside one day and tells him this, a sad smile lingering in the corner of her unpatched eye. She asks him if he'll continue shuttling schoolwork between school and the hospital for Maka, and he acquiesces if only because it gives him an official reason to visit her every weekday.

Ever since the entrance exam, it's like someone poked a hole in Maka's spirit. Soul can almost see it - day by day, her eyes become just a little more dull, her smiles fewer and farther between. He notices her hand shake when she holds a pencil and her whole body jerk periodically, like she's jolted by electricity, and each time he sees it another part of him unravels.

Homework duties seen to, Soul stares blankly at the floor while Maka naps beneath a formidable pile of blankets. Spirit had stopped by earlier to drop off some of her favorite books and spend a few quiet moments sitting next to her with a hand on her knee. But then it was back to work, as he'd explained with a sad smile and a vague gesture at the machines surrounding her.

He notices her violin case shoved under her backpack in a corner of the room, the science stickers and little newspaper poems she'd taken such care to curate peeling off. He wanders over and gently slides it out, frowning at the light coating of dust it's somehow accrued.

He looks up when he hears the mattress shift and finds Maka looking at him with bleary eyes and static hair. "What are you doing?"

Soul hastily closes the case. "Just remembering how nice your violin is." She's still quiet, so he asks, "Do you want to play it for a little bit?"

"No."

Surprised, Soul opens his mouth to see what the problem is but she cuts him off preemptively. "I just don't want to play today." She sighs, shoulders spasming slightly. "Actually, I think I'm just going to go back to sleep. You should probably go home."

"It's fine, I brought things to-"

"Go home, Soul."

The weariness in her voice defeats him. "Okay." He gathers his belongings and slowly walks to the door, pausing with a hand on the knob. "Sleep well, Maka."

She gives him a depleted smile in return.

/

The next week, Soul isn't allowed to see her.

"What do you mean, she told you she didn't want to see anyone?" he says, shock blending with outrage and hurt. "I was just there a few days ago, what could have happened-"

"I wish I could tell you," Spirit sighs from the other end of the line. "She doesn't do her homework anymore either. I wish," he clears his throat, "I wish there were more I could do."

There's nothing to say to that, so Soul just stays on the line, staring out the window and increasingly mad that the sky can still be so blue.

"I'd better go - she's awake for now. Thanks again, you know, for everything." Spirit ends the call and Soul is left to pace around his room for an hour, staring at the patch of wallpaper on which he and Maka and Wes used to doodle music notes until his stomach rumbles and he makes his way into the kitchen.

As he heats up a slice of the lasagna he made the other night, he wonders how he can get through to her. If having people there in person is too much, then maybe she'd prefer words.

[[hey maka. just wanted to see how youre doing]]

He leaves his phone on the counter while he collects his lasagna from the microwave, and when he gets back there's a message blinking at him.

[[I'm fine.]]

Fine, huh? [[think you'll be up for me stoppin by tomorrow?]]

His phone is barely back in his pocket before he feels it buzz again.

[[Probably not. Thanks for the offer, though.]]

Soul frowns at his screen for a minute before replying. [[what about your school work?]]

With finals around the corner, there's no way she'll want to miss the review work they've been getting the past week and a half.

[[It doesn't matter.]]

She doesn't respond to his texts for the rest of the night, and he stares at the backs of his eyelids for almost an hour before he gives up and heads to the music room. When even Debussy isn't enough to calm him, he wanders into the kitchen and rummages through various covered leftover containers to reach for the almond milk in the back of the refrigerator. His elbow bumps the old carton of strawberries he'd forgotten about from when she was over a few weeks ago and he watches silently as they drop to the floor, dark juice oozing where they melt on white tile.

Suddenly not hungry at all, Soul heads back to the piano and pokes a few keys, staring at the ways his hands flow and bend and create and wondering if this is what Maka had seen, too, and if there's a way to show her what her music does for him. His idle plinking soon becomes the opening to her song, and as he listens to the strength of it, he pauses to pull out his phone.

Everyone needs someone to play them to sleep.

He records just a few minutes of it, the parts that fill him with courage gilded white-gold and that make him yearn to dig his hands into the messy, convoluted, beautiful chaos of living. Maybe it will reach her, too.

After he sends the clip in an unadorned text, he heads to his bedroom to see if sleep will be any easier. Before he closes his eyes, he checks his messages one last time, and smiles faintly at the small 'read' beneath the file.

/

Soul doesn't hear from her for a few days, the read receipts she blessedly forgot to turn off the only way he knows she's looking at her phone. Blake just shrugs when Soul asks about her before classes, an uncharacteristic frown at odds with the multiple neon shutter shades hanging from his collar. "I don't know, man. She won't talk to me. I tried to see her the other day, but they wouldn't let me in. Something about 'limited visiting.'"

They don't let Soul in either, and Spirit just sounds weary on the phone when he tries asking, again, why she won't see him.

At the end of the week, once he's dragged himself through too many review classes and put up with Blake's apparent need to be everywhere Soul is _all the time,_ Soul trudges to his locker to exchange textbooks and go home for the weekend. A small piece of paper slips out from a binder, falling so fast he crumples it in his surprise to catch it.

Time freezes while he stands there, crushed by the weight of a hundred days spent casually ignoring her notes. How much of her time - her precious, precious time - did he waste by never reading them? Slowly, he unfolds the paper and stares at the emptiness of his own handwriting until the world blurs and he's blinking too fast to read anything.

He gets her text at nine that night.

[[Hey, do you want to stop by?]]

It takes him a moment to dust the flour from his hands - stress baking is apparently a thing he does now - and he's very glad no one is around to see him nearly drop his phone in the bread dough he'd been painstakingly kneading for the last half-hour.

[[yeah. when's good for you?]]

[[How about right now?]]

He glances at the time. [[aren't visiting hours almost over?]]

[[It's fine, I'll meet you outside. I made friends with one of the night nurses.]]

As he's furiously typing about how she should be resting, his phone buzzes again.

[[And if you tell me anything at all vaguely related to how you think I'm feeling, I will feed you your own spine.]]

Pausing, he deletes what he's written and responds with a simple, and safer, [[be there soon]].

The hospital looks a lot more sinister at night, and despite the lack of chill in the warm May breeze, Soul still shivers slightly walking alongside manicured gardens towards the entrance.

"Hey, over here," a voice whisper-yells from a nearby bush.

Startled, he takes a step back until he sees Maka's face framed by small leaves.

"Hey, Maka," he says when his pulse is no longer approaching hummingbird status.

"Come this way. There's a little sitting area over here."

He follows her through the various shrubs and saplings and other small plants arranged by the hospital until they arrive at a sturdy wooden bench near a small water feature. It looks like bubbling oil, they're so far from adequate lights, but before Soul can let that unsettle him too much he notices another woman waiting nearby.

"Soul, this is Blair, the nurse I was telling you about."

The woman extends a nicely manicured hand and shakes his firmly. "Nice to meet you. This little one has told me all about you." She winks at Maka, who just smiles in a tired, affectionate way. "I just couldn't say no to this late night rendezvous. I'll go keep watch by the front, but she _does_ need to get to bed within the hour, so make sure you say what you need to say by then." Another wink and she's walking back the way they came, her violet hair a wavy fan down her back.

"I'm sorry I've been a bad friend," Maka says once Blair is gone. "I thought it'd be better to just cut ties sooner rather than later, since, well." She looks at the ground and sighs. "I hope one day you'll forgive me."

"I forgive you right now." Soul walks to the bench and takes a seat, more so that she won't stubbornly insist on standing while he is than anything else, and is relieved when she follows. "I'd rather spend time _with you_ than spend it hoping you'll read your texts."

"You know, I've been thinking a lot about time," she says, voice taking on a strange, strained quality that makes him wants to scoot closer. "Even though we can arbitrarily set a measure for it, in the end it's so subjective, right? Everyone feels it differently. For some people, sixty seconds feels like forty, or over a minute, and we all go around living on these separate timelines until something crashes them together. Music does that, makes you align your time with someone else's so you can hit the same beats and follow the same rhythm, and don't you think that's like magic, Soul? That time can be bent that way?"

"What are you saying?" A cold, sinking feeling settles in his blood, and he would do anything to take the frightened lilt out of her voice.

When she looks at him, there's a fragile over-brightness to her eyes, like that of a dying star. "Make sure you don't stop hanging out with Blake and Liz, all right? They're good people who care about you a lot, and it never hurts to have more close friends. And don't forget to actually clean your room - you've always been so messy I'm surprised you've made it this far without getting mange."

"Stop," Soul says, the bottom dropping out of his stomach at the false cheer in her voice.

"And maybe check in on my dad now and then. He gets lonely, you know? And please, please," she gasps slightly, a small tremor running through her body, "don't forget about me."

She folds like a paper crane, sadness pouring off of her in waves as she hugs her knees to her chest. Not knowing what else to do, he puts an arm around her shoulders and she immediately falls against him, the little hitches of her breath reverberating like gunshots in his chest.

"Maka, what's going on?"

"I'm trying," she says between shallow breaths. "But I'm starting to think it won't be enough. My body only listens to me half the time, and I can't stop thinking about how I won't be able to hear how deep your voice'll get or listen to Blake's ridiculous stories or watch Liz talk us into free drinks-" her voice breaks and she sobs, shoulders shaking. "I don't want to die."

The thin layer of denial he's clung to these past few weeks shatters. He doesn't know who is holding whom now, the hollow of her ribs stark beneath his fingers as he rubs her back. His throat hasn't felt this tight since the morning he woke up and realized he'll never hear his mother's laugh again, or watch Wes wink at the maids while playing them a jaunty tune.

And just like then, there's nothing he can do to make it better.

"There's this experimental treatment they offered me," she says after a while, sitting up and wiping at her eyes. "I'm going to do it. It might not fix anything at all, but I have to try, right? The thing is, they scheduled it for the day they announce who made it into Shibusen."

"I'll tell you the results as soon as you're out of surgery," he says, loath to remove his arm but suddenly self-conscious about keeping it there. "I'll be there when you wake up, and-" he tries to smile but somehow can only muster the energy for a small twitch of his lips - "then we'll start planning what we wanna do when we're freshman. Okay?"

A small sigh. "Sure."

They sit in silence for a while, the quiet broken only by the bubbling fountain and the sound of Maka's hospital gown catching on the bench when she twitches. Too soon, Blair materializes from the night and leads them back to a side entrance where he hovers awkwardly until Maka smiles genuinely for the first time that night and hugs him with almost enough strength for him to believe she's barely sick at all.

"Thanks for everything," she murmurs, still squeezing his sides while Blair holds the door open almost anxiously, like she had already broken enough rules for one night and any more would put Maka at risk. "I might not be very fun to be around, but if you want to come over after school again, I won't stop you anymore."

"I'll be there," he says, allowing himself to lean into the hug for just a second before gently stepping back and waving her away. "Night, Maka."

"Night, Soul."

/

The day before her surgery, Soul packs a bag with homemade sandwiches and heads over to the hospital. Blake and Liz meet him there, and Blake loudly makes plans to take them all to see his family during summer vacation and Liz talks about bringing Maka out with her sister Patti to get sundresses and milkshakes, and it's all so normal that Soul thinks maybe everything will be okay after all.

Blake and Liz leave him alone with Maka once the sun sets and she's visibly tiring, the twitches and tremors in her limbs more pronounced and her breathing more labored.

"Tomorrow's the big day," Soul says, just to have something in the air between them other than the silence of her wilting smile.

"Yeah." She fidgets in bed for a moment, passing a small rubber ball between her palms - physical therapy, she'd grumbled - and exhales sharply when she drops it.

"I hope it works," she says quietly, arms jerking. "I haven't been able to play in so long."

Seeing her stare at the violin case in the corner of the room, clearly untouched amidst the pile of other items on top of and around it, makes the strange knot in his stomach grow. He reaches into his bag and rips a small piece of paper from a notebook and scrawls a few words. Without a word, he gets up and hands it to Maka.

It's enough to break her gaze from her violin, at least. "What's this?" She blinks a few times, slowly, when she reads the _I'm here_ he'd written on it. "Soul…" The distance in her eyes shatters and she reaches for his hand, overshooting it the first time but managing to mostly grab it the second. "Thank you."

"I'll come over as soon as the exam results let out," he says, indulging in the faint warmth of her touch. "I'll be here when you wake up."

She smiles, and if it doesn't quite reach her eyes, well, that's okay, because she squeezes his hand and doesn't let it go even when Blair pokes her head in and signals visiting hours are over.

"Thanks again for everything," she says while her hands shake and her shoulders twitch. "I'll see you tomorrow."

He doesn't miss how her smile wavers when she says tomorrow and just squeezes her hand harder. "And then we'll invite Blake and Liz over and have as much shortcake as you can stomach, and then we can argue about which co-ed dorm is the best. All right?"

"Sure." She tries another weak smile and looks once more at her violin case. "Hey, would you mind bringing my violin over here? I might not be able to play, but I want it close tonight."

"Of course." He carefully grabs the case and wipes off the thin layer of dust before depositing it on her lap.

"Oh, and the pen and paper in my backpack, if you don't mind?"

It takes him a moment to wrestle through the textbooks sandwiching her notebook like lead bookends, but he eventually manages to extricate it, tear out a page, and remove her favorite fountain pen from its special pocket. He hands these to her as well, watching as she carefully folds the page and sets it next to her.

Blair clears her throat from the door and Soul stubs his toe on the side of the bed in his haste to turn around. "Time to go, Soul," she says with the kind of compassionate acceptance he doesn't want to hear right now.

He walks to the door and lingers by it, one foot out of the room as he twists to get a final look at her. "See you tomorrow, Maka."

She nods, and the last thing he sees is her reaching for her pen.

/

The auditorium is only sparsely populated the day of the results reveal, something Soul is grateful for as he takes a seat near the back exit after school. He doesn't know what he'd do if he had to deal with too many people on top of his barely-contained anxiety about Maka's condition. Glancing at a clock, he sees that right about now she should be going under for the first part of the procedure, if he understands the very technical explanation she'd given him last night when he'd mustered the courage to ask.

He can't brood about it further, though, because Blake quite literally kicks down the double doors to the auditorium and saunters over to Soul wearing the most offensive jean jacket and bedazzled jort outfit he's ever had the misfortune to see.

"Oh shit whaddup," he says in greeting, plopping himself next to Soul and kicking his feet up on the empty seat in front of him. "Ready to learn you the best?"

Soul puts his head in his hands. "Where's Liz?" he asks from between his knees, wondering how he can even find the energy to be surprised by anything Blake says or does at this point.

"Oh, she's here. Said something about 'I can't be seen with you, so I'll come in from a different entrance' or something."

Jackie and Kim walk by at that point, and Kim gives Soul a jaunty wave before sitting next to Jackie and slinging an arm around her shoulders.

With a small sigh, Soul sits all the way up and actually manages a genuine smile when Blake launches into a story involving a lockpick and gratuitous amounts of shaving cream before Liz shows up and their principal walks onstage.

"Good afternoon, everyone," she says primly, adjusting the glasses on her nose. "We are here to announce the Shibusen entrance exam results, so without further ado, I'd like to welcome our chief judge, Dominic Mortimer."

After the brief applause, a jovial man dressed in something like a magician's outfit walks onstage and theatrically clears his throat. "Greetings, greetings," he says, gesturing expansively at the audience. "Today, we welcome two new additions to our venerable halls. I ask that any and all applause be held until the end, because as per Shibusen tradition, we ask that the winners come up to the stage to play a small celebratory piece!"

With a final broad smile, he reaches into a jacket pocket and pulls out a small piece of paper. "Congratulations to Maka Albarn and Soul Evans - welcome to Shibusen and please come to the stage!"

Soul barely registers Blake's loud hoots of affirmation or Kim's sour expression as she claps politely, because _they did it_. He looks to his right, ready to see his smile amplified tenfold in the depths of Maka's eyes, until he remembers where she is and what is being done to her, and instead stands and walks to the stage alone.

Suddenly nervous about explaining Maka, Soul opens his mouth but is gently cut off by Dominic. "We understand that Maka cannot be here today due to extenuating circumstances, but we still welcome you to play for us, Soul."

"Yes, sir," he says, and walks to the piano at the back of the stage. It's colder, somehow, being up here without Maka's solar presence, but then he thinks of all the colors she's returned to his life, and it's not so lonely anymore.

After a nod from Mr. Mortimer, he begins to play. This time, though, instead of bottling his worries and fears, he lets them flow through him and out into the world in waves of heartfelt sound. Rather than play something traditional, as he's sure they're expecting, he traces the bright lines following note after note in his mind and sets every other thought aside.

He skims the lower register and remembers that moonlit night in the practice hall when he pushed her away, his perspective now lending a much richer undertone to what had been such an empty sound. His music cascades into the auditorium full of life and color, and for a shining moment, Soul is at peace.

Then Maka walks onstage.

Eyes wide, heart racing, Soul watches her glide to center stage. She's dressed in a shimmering celestial gown he's never seen before, and the way she looks at him with sad, knowing eyes sends a chill down his spine. Then, she begins to play.

Her melody fills the holes in his music with the kind of effortless grace that drives a stake through his heart, because if she's here, like this-

The overwhelming presence of her sound fills him up and merges with the music that now moves so smoothly from his fingertips, both supporting and driving it forward in such a uniquely _Maka_ way that he feels a lump form in his throat. She glances at him over her shoulder and gives him a small smile, one that tugs at unchapped lips and eyes that are no longer shaded by purple bags, and then moves into the reprise.

Soul can only follow, can only try to keep down the pressure building in his chest as he sees small sparks skitter along her strings and watches her perform perfectly executed bow-hops without a twitch or a tremor in sight. He feels her music surge within him, awakening new colors to shade his own in more nuanced, expansive ways. Now, every note he plays echoes with a faint violin accompaniment, even when she stops playing to look at him with an expression so full of regret that he plays harder in the hopes that it'll keep her here longer.

Soul watches, horrified, as she raises her bowing arm in a casual salute and begins to fade around the edges, each layer of her form being released in pockets of sound that disperse into the auditorium like smoky wisps.

Soon it's just her face that's left, and as she looks at him with that same heartbroken expression that's been behind all of her smiles these past few months, no matter how genuine, then he knows. Knows with a certainty that levels him to the core and tears a sob from his throat, a certainty that bends him double over the piano as his chest implodes and crushes the breath from his lungs. This was _never_ how it was supposed to be, should _never_ have been an option, and all he can do is let sobs rattle his form as he somehow continues to play.

He ends the song with a slow, receding note, and stares at the ceiling. The noise of the audience clapping sinks around him as he looks towards the last spot he saw Maka's form and weeps.

/

If time can be bent, why can't it be bent back?

/

New takeout containers litter the floor. His phone is buried somewhere under one of them, but it doesn't matter, since it's dead anyway.

Just like her.

/

Everything is red. Shades of red, hues of red, entire palettes of nauseating, gory red.

He stares at his bloodshot eyes in the mirror, face puffy and wet, and resists the urge to slam his face into the mirror with the same tired numbness that stopped him from contemplating kitchen knives. He's done this before, should be a _pro_ , but every time he thinks about her and the look on Spirit's face when he told him she didn't make it, he squeezes out what he keeps telling himself are the last tears he'll shed over her.

He's a terrible liar.

/

He plugs his phone in on the sixth day, when he can go as long as a few hours without crying when he thinks about her.

It's a good thing he did, because he's bombarded by missed calls and texts about funeral arrangements. By the time he's done squinting through the various text chains and responding to Blake and Liz's increasingly threatening inquiries about his wellbeing, he realizes that the ceremony is tomorrow and that he'd better dig out a suit. He mostly ignores the tightness in his throat that comes from thinking about how his tie will be so crooked.

/

It should be illegal to have a funeral on such a beautiful day.

The sky is clear and the sun radiant as Soul moves through the crowd of mourners like he's sleepwalking, slow and detached. Spirit sees him and half-raises a hand in greeting, so Soul wanders over and stares out over the pristine desert until Spirit clears his throat and looks at him. "Thank you for coming." he begins, eyes bloodshot and weariness like a miasma around him. "It means a lot."

"I wouldn't miss it," Soul replies, adjusting the tight, starchy stiffness of his suit collar.

Spirit smiles thinly and stares at the milling people for a bit. "She tried so hard, you know," he says, turning those sad eyes on Soul. "She really wanted to make it into Shibusen."

"Yeah." The thought of walking through those doors alone is almost enough to make him go home and never leave his room again, but it takes less energy to just stand here and speak.

"I wonder if she knows she did it, if she knows how proud I am of her." Spirit's face crumples and he clears his throat, clearly trying his best not to lose what little composure he has. "She left this for you." He pulls out an envelope and a flash drive, and hands them almost reverently to Soul. "From before she went under, in case-"

Soul looks at the letter in his hands, his name written in Maka's neat hand with a small black cat sticker holding it closed. When he glances up again, Spirit has tears spilling down his cheeks and he pulls Soul into a tight, shaking hug. "You'll always be welcome in my home. If you ever need anything, just let me know."

Spirit's shirt has that faint herbal smell that always clung to Maka's clothes and hair, and Soul leans into the hug for a few extra seconds.

Blake and Liz are there as well, and the fact that Blake is actually dressed presentably hurts more than anything. They don't say much (what is there to say?), but Soul finds their quiet presence comforting in its own way.

After the ceremony, when Maka's ashes are scattered and tear-stained faces look on with heavy gazes, Soul acquiesces to Blake's insistence he and Liz come over for breakfast the next day before driving back home to see what Maka had written him.

The house feels especially empty without her, and Soul does his best not to think about that as he walks past the practice hall, through the kitchen, and up to his bedroom. Once he's back in bed, he fiddles with the flash drive for a moment while he musters the nerve to read her letter.

But that's what courage is for, right?

Gently, so as not to rip the sticker she'd placed on the flap, Soul slides open the letter and unfolds it, heart clenching when he realizes the emerald ink is from the pen he'd given her the last day he saw her.

 _Dear Soul,_

 _It's strange, writing to someone I was just talking to. But I wanted to be sure that you knew the whole story in case something doesn't go well tomorrow._

 _You know, I first heard you play when I was six. Mama took me to the symphony while Papa was slung over the toilet after a night out drinking. All I wanted to do was go home and make sure he was okay, and I was scared because Mama was so, so angry, but then you walked onstage. This little snowy-haired boy with an old man slouch and droopy eyes - I wasn't sure what to expect._

 _But then you started playing, and I'd never heard anything so colorful._

 _It was like being thrown into that point where the ocean meets the sky, a warping, living singularity of sound. I was transfixed. When I went home that night, I pestered Mama until she agreed to let me take violin lessons so I could play with you one day. Imagine my surprise when she said she knew your family! I was so nervous to meet you that I hardly slept the night before that first lesson with Wes._

 _Who'd have thought you'd be so quiet, this boy whose sound echoed so forcefully in my mind?_

 _I really treasure those days. Spending time with you and Wes and your family felt like home, but no matter what I did, you always seemed so distant. I tried talking to Wes about it, and he said that music was the best way for you to connect to people. So I decided that I'd get better at the violin in the hopes that maybe my sound would reach you, too._

 _I nagged Wes endlessly until he took me under his wing. I figured the best way to get good enough to play with you would be to learn from someone as skillful as he was, and when the opportunity arose to play with him, I took it. But somehow, the better I got under Wes, the more distant you seemed to become. I never could figure it out, but maybe if I get better, you could tell me._

 _And then I started fainting._

 _It wasn't a big deal, at first. I'd get a little dizzy, maybe have trouble breathing for a minute or two, and then it'd go away. But it got worse and worse when it did happen, so I began going to the doctor's a lot. Soon my hands would shake, and I couldn't stop it. Playing the violin was hard, and the first night I couldn't hold my bow straight, I cried for hours._

 _The meds helped until they didn't._

 _The final straw was seeing Papa cry talking to a doctor, and that's when I really knew I didn't have much time._

 _But I didn't want to give up. A spot opened up in an experimental treatment at Yale that might extend my life, and I jumped at the opportunity. But it meant I had to leave immediately, and I didn't want you to know how sick I was. I figured I'd tell you when I got back and felt better._

 _I had no idea what was going to happen. The treatment hit me hard - most days, it was all I could do to open my eyes. I wasn't really there mentally, either - Papa told me about the accident, but I wasn't recovered enough to reach out until a few weeks after the funeral. And then it'd just ring and ring and ring._

 _You must have been hurting so much. What a terrible friend I am, leaving you alone like that. I hope one day you'll forgive me._

 _I'm sorry if those notes bothered you. Music is your strongest language; words are mine._

 _I never thought I'd enjoy riding on a motorcycle, but the wind through your hair is really something, isn't it? And the moon through the curtains in the practice hall was just as ethereal as when we were kids. It was nice cooking breakfast with you those mornings, and sleeping on the couches we used to hide behind during hide and seek. You snore like an angry kitten, you know? Maybe one day we'll get to wake up somewhere cold for a change. That was one nice thing about Connecticut, watching the snow pile up from my window._

 _Do you think I made it into someone's heart? Did I make it into yours? I hope I reached you._

 _I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you, Soul Evans. It's always been you._

 _Thank you for everything. Don't you dare waste time missing me._

 _Maka_

 _P.S. Find enclosed a flash drive. You always brought out a song in me._

Soul rereads the letter two, three, four times, until her _I love you_ sinks in and the knot in his chest disintegrates. She loved him, _she loved him_ , and now it's too late to tell her he loved her, too. Cradling the letter to his chest, he rocks away the first wave of sadness before distracting himself with his old laptop, plugging it in and brushing his fingertips lightly over her signature while it charges enough to use.

When the laptop finally clicks and wheezes to life, he inserts the USB and drags out an mp3 titled simply _You_.

It's breathtaking.

The beginning is slow, dusky, keening. Sweeping low notes slur into bright bursts of triumphant vibrato that remind him of fluttering post-its and fiery eyes, sun-bleached hallways and hands that always sought his. His chest tightens and his throat aches because it's like she's still here, like all he has to do is turn around quickly enough and there she'll be, violin case on her back and hand outstretched, and _god, why did she have to go?_

Her song ends on such a ringing, transcendent note that he thinks he could do anything at all. Something about it scratches at his memory, though, and he gets a fleeting impression of late nights staring at the ceiling before he realizes this is the full version of that clip she sent so many months ago.

He puts it on repeat for the rest of the night, and many nights thereafter.

/

Somehow, time still passes.

It's been a month since Maka died, and the start of summer is as hot and bright as it always is. Soul still doesn't sleep enough and sometimes has to cancel plans because dealing with people is just too much some days, though others he picks up the phone to invite Blake over. Spirit drops by every few weeks and they toast to Maka's memory over shortcake and homemade whipped cream.

"You've been in my heart a long time," he murmurs to no one in particular one dusty summer evening as he rereads her letter in the practice hall, laid out on the floor next to the piano. On a whim, he grabs his laptop from the kitchen and sets it up on a nearby end table, Maka's song for him playing at max volume.

He listens to it for a few beats and then begins to weave in his song for her, an empty smile on his lips when he realizes how perfectly they harmonize. He plays and plays and plays, well past the end of her song and even past the end of his, creating something new and flowing and seamless from the aching part of him that wishes he hadn't wasted so much of her time shutting her out - that he'd told her how much she meant to him, reconciling every wish he's ever had into something that proves he's alive.

The newness of this song calls to him in a way that makes him lean in, and he hears small echoes of her within it, can almost feel the sliver of her spirit that's now an indelible part of who he is, because she was right after all. People remake themselves every day through the words and music and little personality quirks of those who move them, and she's a part of him, now.

Long after he steps away from the piano and shuts down his laptop, he can hear her music filling the silence between beats, in the small, quiet moments while he's putting socks on and slicing fruit and reaching for the fallboard. He hears her in the tinkling water at the fountain in the park where he meets Liz for lunch on weekends, and in the rumble of his motorcycle right before he opens the throttle.

One day, when he's sitting next to Blake on a bench in the shopping district, he chuckles quietly to himself during a lull in their conversation.

Blake looks at him strangely. "You good, bro?"

"Yeah," Soul says, listening to Maka's music fill the space between his words. "Just enjoying the song."

Soul smiles at Blake's confused face and closes his eyes as he adjusts to being the only person in the world who hears music in the silence.


End file.
